Schrader, Howard Wayne

ORAL HISTORY OF HOWARD W. SCHRADER
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
November 12, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview is for the Center of Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is November 12, 2012. I am Don Hunnicutt in the home of Mr. Howard Wayne Schrader, 196 Northwestern Avenue, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take an oral history about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Please state your full name, date of birth, and place of birth.
MR. SCHRADER: Howard Wayne Schrader. Date of birth June 5, 1938. I was born in Pulaski, Virginia, in the Pulaski Hospital.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall your father’s place of birth? And would you state his name also?
MR. SCHRADER: I do. My father’s name was Allan Marzell Schrader. He was born in Ivanhoe, Virginia, on April 26, 1909.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your mama’s name?
MR. SCHRADER: My mother’s name was Alma Marie Hall Schrader, of course and she was born in Pulaski, Virginia, May 12, 1915.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father’s school history, do you recall?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, of course, he graduated high school, then he went on and did some night courses for two years. I forgot the name of that correspondence school but it was well-known.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your mother’s school history?
MR. SCHRADER: High school, only.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of work did your father do?
MR. SCHRADER: He was assistant general foreman at Y-12 when he retired in the Maintenance Division.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Prior to coming to Y-12 in Oak Ridge, what was your father’s job?
MR. SCHRADER: He was a machinist for Hercules Powder Company in Radford, Virginia.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your mother work?
MR. SCHRADER: No, never did work. Well, she did before I was born, I’m sorry about that. She worked at the knitting mill there in Virginia at Pulaski, but I after I was born, she didn’t work.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you have brothers and sisters?
MR. SCHRADER: No.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Why did your father come to Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: He got dissatisfied, he was frozen on the job there at the Hercules Powder Company because it was war time critical job and he got aggravated at the way he was getting treated. My Uncle Archie had come to Oak Ridge as a carpenter and built a lot of these houses and he told Daddy about the [inaudible] and Dad came down and hired in on April 1, 1944.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your mom come with your father when he came?
MR. SCHRADER: No, he came by himself and stayed with my Uncle Archie Hall for about three or four months, and finally I came down. My first trip to Oak Ridge was August 6, 1944.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how they got to Oak Ridge, in means of transportation?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, they came in a ‘39 Plymouth Station wagon.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was the first home that your parents lived in, in Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: 360 Louisiana Avenue.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of house was that?
MR. SCHRADER: It’s what we use to call a flattop. It’s pre-fabricated in three sections and shipped out on back of a truck and then they put all three sections together on a set of stilts. I took a picture of it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of heating did a flattop have?
MR. SCHRADER: Coal stove.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get your coal?
MR. SCHRADER: Roane-Anderson brought it to us and we had a little coal house up near of the road and they would bring it and keep that coal house full of coal.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did you do with the ashes that you took out of the coal stove?
MR. SCHRADER: We dumped them out in the yard.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe the inside of the flattop. What did it look like?
MR. SCHRADER: Ours was furnished, 2 bedrooms; it had a coal stove and inside, behind the stove was a corrugated asbestos wall between the stove and the kitchen. As you came up the steps, you entered in directly into the living room, and off to the right of the living room was the pantry and the kitchen. And the kitchen was furnished with a three burner electric stove, and a refrigerator, and then in the living room, when you came directly in, had a folding table with two [inaudible] that would fold up, and then you can seat about eight people around it if you needed to. And had a couch, no chair except the chairs for the table and there was four chairs that went with the table. And then as you proceed, if you came directly through the door, walked past the stove on your right and went right back, the first door to your right was the bathroom and then diagonally from where you came in was one bedroom, and then to the left was another bedroom. That was it; that was all of it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how your mother washed clothes when she was living in the flattop, or were you too young?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh I recall, we had an easy washing machine and it was an old wringer type washing machine, you know, you put the clothes into the tub part and it would wash the clothes around and then after you finished that you have to rinse them and then you ran them through the wringer to dry. And then you took them outside and hung them on the clothesline to dry.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What were the wringers? What did they consist of?
MR. SCHRADER: They were two rubber rollers that were mounted horizontally on a pivoting arm that would pivot over the tub. And as you rinse the clothes with fresh water, you would take them out of there and feed them in to the wringer, and the wringer was powered so it would pull the clothes through the wringer, and of course, you had to have a washtub behind it to catch the damp clothes in, and they were ready to go outside and hang on the lines.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, where was the washing machine located in the flattop?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, it was on wheels. We usually put it back in the pantry until she’s ready to wash. When she’s ready to wash, she’d roll it out the kitchen where she could get to the water.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Hook up to the faucet for water?
MR. SCHRADER: You didn’t hook it up, you took a pan and filled it with the pan.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mention you hung the clothes out on the clothesline. What was the clothesline? How was that [inaudible]?
MR. SCHRADER: Clothesline was a couple of posts. I used to put them in for Granddad Cecil. People needed them. They were posts to put in the ground and usually they have anywhere from two to four lines stretched between two posts about 50 to 60 feet apart. And they were about 6 foot off the ground, 5 foot, you know, high enough where a lady could reach them and many times, after you hung a bunch of clothes on them, they would sag and we had a prop usually a long stick or some kind that you’d sit under there to hold the clothesline up.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you attach the clothes to the clothesline, just lay them over the line or—
MR. SCHRADER: Well, in some cases, but most cases, you use clothes pins, and clothes pins were wooden clips that you can pinch on the back end and open the front end and slide down over the clothes and then release it and they would clamp around the line and the clothes. The other clothes pin types were just wedge type. They were about 6 to 8 inches long and they just had a slot in them that was cut on the taper and you slip it down until that slot would hold the clothes on the line.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what the flattop material was made of?
MR. SCHRADER: Plywood, most of it was just plywood.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Windows so you could open for ventilation?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, we had windows all around like in that picture? Of course, you see the picture windows there on the living room, but then all around the house there were little square windows about like that and they were on a pivot. They pivoted in and out. They didn’t slide up and down like most windows. They pivoted in and out and—.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, that picture indicates the sidewalk was made out of wood. Is that the way your sidewalk was made?
MR. SCHRADER: Wooden sidewalk.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year—how old were you when you lived in the flattop?
MR. SCHRADER: 6 years old.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And you lived there how long?
MR. SCHRADER: We moved to Woodland in 1950. We moved to 132 Northwestern Avenue.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, Woodland is another section of Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: That was the last section that the government built in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what was the school name that you attended in?
MR. SCHRADER: The first school I attended was Highland View where the Children’s Museum is now.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that kindergarten?
MR. SCHRADER: No, I never went to kindergarten, I went to the first grade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And you moved from there to Woodland?
MR. SCHRADER: And Miss McMillan, I think was my teacher [inaudible]. They finish building the Old Linden School, so the 2nd grade I went to Linden.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was Linden School located, do you recall?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes, it was down below Lehigh Lane. I forgot the name of that road.
MR. HUNNICUTT: LaSalle?
MR. SCHRADER: LaSalle, that’s it. And on LaSalle, there’s a bunch of soccer fields there now. They’ve torn the whole thing down. They built a new Linden school but it was right there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about going to school at either Highland View or Linden School?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, I remember my first grade teacher was Miss McMillan at Highland View. She drove a 1938 black Buick. I got my first spanking the first day I went and my dad had a rule if I got spanked at school, I got spanked at home. So, I got two spankings that day.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did you do to require a spanking?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, this little girl, we were in line and this little girl pushed me out of line and I pushed her back, but the teacher didn’t see that little girl push me, but she saw me push the little girl. So, I got a couple of whacks there and—
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, when you went home did you tell your dad you had gotten a spanking?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t have to. Miss McMillan had already told him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where your parents strict on you?
MR. SCHRADER: Not overly so, they made sure I minded, but you know, they didn’t beat me every day or anything like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So after attending Linden School, you moved to the Woodland address?
MR. SCHRADER: I moved to Woodland in the 6th grade and I finished the last half of the 6th grade down here in Woodland School.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, you attended Linden up to the 6th grade, is that correct?
MR. SCHRADER: Through half of the 6th grade. It was from the 2nd grade to half of the 6th grade, I went to Linden. And then we moved over here in January of 1950, and I finished the last half of the 6th grade, we were in Woodland.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember some of the classes you took when you were in school?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t know, well yeah, at Linden, Miss Phillips was my 2nd grade teacher. I fell in love with her. I had a crush on her and we had music, we had physical education-gym, what we called gym. That was about the sum of the grammar school courses and—
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, how do you get back and forth [inaudible]?
MR. SCHRADER: We had art. I’m sorry, I had art, too.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get back and forth from your home to school?
MR. SCHRADER: Walked.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you take your lunch to school?
MR. SCHRADER: No, I went home to eat lunch every day.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember how long they gave you for lunch?
MR. SCHRADER: I think it was 45 minutes, but I’m not sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, when you live at 360 Louisiana Avenue and you went to Linden School, how far away would that be?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, be right from here to Wal-Mart [inaudible].
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, you have to hurry and walk home and eat and hurry back in 45 minutes?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, well I hurried everywhere back then, you know. I walked down the hill, walked down Lehigh Lane and then there was a path through the woods and I walked down there and I’d be at school in seven or eight minutes, you know it didn’t take long at all.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have a bicycle?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes, I did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you every ride the bicycle to school?
MR. SCHRADER: Not to school too much, but I rode it all over Oak Ridge and anywhere else I wanted to. Back then, people didn’t take their kids to school in cars, in fact, most families didn’t have a car. A lot of them [inaudible] had one car.
I remember we had a ’41 Plymouth, 2 door sedan and even then Dad carpooled to work. You know, there was four guys in the carpool including him and a lot of people up there where we lived didn’t have automobiles, you know. So, we rode the bus or you rode your bicycle.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your dress code? Did you wear, what clothing did you wear when you went in school?
MR. SCHRADER: Blue jeans and a shirt, most of the time. Every now and then Mom made me wear shorts, I hated that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have lace up shoes?
MR. SCHRADER: Mostly, it was tennis shoes, lace up shoes, yeah. Sometimes, she’d make me wear dress shoes, but they were lace up too.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, these tennis shoes, were they like what we call tennis shoes today?
MR. SCHRADER: No, no. They were black with the white soles around them and they came up ankle high and they laced all the way.
MR. HUNNICUTT: High top shoes?
MR. SCHRADER: High top tennis shoes, right and that was the only kind available. There wasn’t any other kind.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did your mother do her grocery shopping when you lived on Louisiana Avenue?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, the days that she had a car, if she needed to she’d go—we didn’t do a whole lot of grocery shopping. We had a—after they opened the gates, was a rolling store that came by which was a converted bus and they would have perishables like milk, eggs, and bread and that kind of thing and a few vegetables and she’d get whatever perishables she needed and then we had people to come around like [inaudible] and they would bring coffee and soap powder and a lot of things like that. So, it was a lot of door to door action, you know, Bunny Bread came in the bread truck, [inaudible], what else?
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about vacuum cleaner salesman?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, yeah. I remember we bought an Electrolux vacuum cleaner from my Uncle Archie, selling them on the side.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that the first vacuum cleaner your mother ever owned?
MR. SCHRADER: No, no. She had a Singer Upright and a Singer Hand Vac, and she had it, she brought that from Virginia when she came down.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how your mother saw Oak Ridge when she first got here?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, she thought it was terrible-mud everywhere. In fact, when I moved to Louisiana Avenue, it wasn’t even paved all the way to the top of the hill. I remember the first old 1938 Ford Army bus, it was painted all in drab. It was our first bus come up there and I remember him spinning on that gravel trying to get up the road and there wasn’t any sidewalks, other than boardwalks to the street. That was it.
Later, they came in and built boardwalks down the side of the street. We had a water tower up the end of the street that’s still there by the way and that was the end of Oak Ridge. You know, from the water tower, West Outer Drive turned into Louisiana, and from there we had what we called G-Road, which was a gravel road and G stand for Guard road and it was all gravel too. They never did pave that until they finally extended Outer Drive, you know West Outer Drive. There was a Girl Scout Camp out, oh, maybe a quarter mile from the water tower on the right, and then as you went on out the road, the road turned down the hill, went down toward Robertsville and right there were it turned, there was a [inaudible] out there and they had piled it up with a bunch of stumps that they moved there.
We call that the ‘stump dump’. We would break in to the Girl Scout Camp routinely, when they weren’t there and out on the top of the hill, we had a trail, as the road turned down to go down Robertsville, we had a trail [inaudible] and there was an apple orchard up there. And when the apples were green, we didn’t wait until they were ripe. You know, while there still green, we’d go up there and raid that apple orchard.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What were some of the games that the neighborhood kids played in those days?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, softball was the big game. Back in those days, there were two roads that no longer exist up there. There was Lenox Circle and Lenox Place, and right directly across from Lehigh Lane, if you’re coming to Louisiana, it was on the left side directly across the lane. If you went straight up, you went into Lenox Place and about half way up the hill you could turn back to the right, parallel to Louisiana. And that was Lenox Circle and it went down and circled around and came back on [inaudible]. And those are all gone now. They tore down all the houses and everything and filled it in and sold it all. But, the point was right behind Lenox Place, they had made the cut like they were going to bring the road back into Louisiana but they never did, and that was our soft ball field. And on one side of the cut, we had dug a fox hole, of course that was during the war time, you know.
So, we played Army and war all the time, and on the other side we built a triangular tree house about 6 or 8 feet off the ground and that was a pirate ship, you know. So, we played softball, we played Army, we played cowboys and Indians, we played whatever was playing at the local theater is what we played, you know. We went to Jefferson Theater every Saturday and right across the road from us, right below the water tower was a big open field and they used that field for mixing sand and gravel, and all the paving and everything they were doing. And those guys would drink a lot of Cokes, and Pepsis, and RC’s, and back in those days, you could get two cents deposit on each bottle.
So, we’d go over there every day and we’d collect up all of the Coke bottles that we could find and then we’d go down to the Robertsville store, which is a church now I think, and we’d trade them in for a two cents apiece. It cost nine cents to get into Jefferson Theater. So, every Saturday, we had have at least a dime, we go down to buy tickets for nine cents and had a penny left over for candy or gum or whatever we was going to get there, and that’s the way we went every Saturday whatever it was, and it was always a double feature with a serial.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you mean by serial?
MR. SCHRADER: Serial was about 12 or 15 chapters of some adventure, you know like, I remember Batman and Robin and The Scarlet Horseman, and Don Winslow and the Navy, and those serials always ended with a hero and some terrible distress and you had to go back next week so if he got out of it, you know.
But, whatever the serial was, that’s what we played until the next one came along and then we played that one, you know. So we had about 12-15 weeks of Robin Hood, and we had about 12-15 weeks as a Scarlet Horseman and whatever was playing Superman and whatever, you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of movie did they show in the main features?
MR. SCHRADER: Mostly, it was Westerns, but every now and then they’d have a mixture, and sometimes they’d have what they call a ‘Cartoon Carnival’, which they’d show you about 6 or 8 cartoon features. And the main thing we would go for on Saturday morning at 11 o’clock, they have what they call the Little Atoms Club, that was a radio program that was staged there from Jefferson stage and we would go down and they’d have different—well, we thought they were celebrities; they’d have yo-yo kings, you know these Filipinos they could really yo-yo, and then at 11:30, they went on the air. You know, they broadcast it at 11:30 until 12, and that’s when the movie came on. And we never missed that, you know. We was there by 11 o’clock just like—we didn’t get to church that [inaudible]. We’d be right there to watch the Little Atoms Club and see what was going on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have some favorite buddies that you went to the movies with?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, Bill Brandon and I went every Saturday; Bill [inaudible] sometimes—
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there a lot of kids in your neighborhood?
MR. SCHRADER: Quite a few, yeah. Bill and Jerry [inaudible] and Elizabeth [inaudible], Marianne Edwards, Dorothy Newton, [inaudible]. I forgot the [inaudible] girls’ name. They were a lot younger then I was. I didn’t play with them too much. They live right beside us. Yeah, there was—I’d say it was about 12-15 right there in the immediate neighborhood.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember when your mother used to hang out clothes? Did the other ladies in the neighborhood gather around the clotheslines and gossip or talk?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, sometimes I guess they did. I don’t remember any particular instance.
I remember during the war, it was hard to get meat and things, and we got some chickens, and we go out there and Dad would wring their necks, you know and they’d flop around and all the neighbors would come out— “What’s that?”
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, describe what you mean by wringing their necks.
MR. SCHRADER: Well, you grab a chicken by his neck and you actually twist the neck real hard and broke it, and then of course, the chicken would run around in circles and you know he was completely disoriented until he died you know, and a lot of times we’d take a hatchet and cut his head off so he’d bleed out. But—
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned standing in lines. Why did you have to stand in line?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, it depended on where it was and what you were doing but a lot of times, you know—well, back then you had food rationing stamps, you had the gas rationing stamps; everything was rationed, you know. And I remember, for instance, my mother had a thing on the stove about that big around and about that tall. It had a [inaudible] on the inside, and she saved all the bacon grease and fat that she had, and you’d take that to the store and you trade it in and you got credit for it. I know whether you got stamps or not, but you got credit for it because they used the fat—it had glycerin in it that they used to make explosions during the war. And so you had to stand in line in the butcher’s shop and then you had to stand in line for a lot of things. Well, I don’t remember standing in line too much for the movies.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about cigarettes, did you stand in line for cigarettes?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t know. Daddy always bought them by the carton, but I don’t know. I remember when we go to Virginia, Oak Ridge was dry and we’d go to Virginia—my dad didn’t drink, but everybody he knew drank and we go up there and we’d stop at the state store up there sold liquor. And you could get five-fifths and that was it, you know. You get a gallon and that was all you could have and we’d put that gallon of whiskey in the whisky and five-fifths all over the car and when we’d come back well, he’d give it to whoever wanted it, you know whoever had him get it for him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, that time the city was gated and you had to go in and out [inaudible].
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, you had to go through the gate and they searched the car. Occasionally, if they suspected something, and I remember, for instance Uncle Archie and Aunt Alpha, they had a lady staying with them. She was an elderly lady and they were taking care of her and what was her name? Annie Catherine. Annie Catherine. And there was a many a time that she rode back to Oak Ridge with the couple fifths under her dress between her legs.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have a personal ID badge?
MR. SCHRADER: No, I never did get one. You had to be 12 years old to get one and they quit—they opened the gates before I was old enough to get one.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, tell me about what you remember when you went through the gates, had to come back. Which gate did you generally go through?
MR. SCHRADER: We generally came back through either [inaudible]. When we got there, of course there was a line of cars; a lot of times if you got there in the daylight, it was a line of cars, they would stop and asked to see your badges, your pass. If you were a visitor, you had to have a visitor’s pass and you had to be met at the gate by whoever is going to escort you in, you know. But, that was about it unless they decide to search your car and sometimes they would search your car and they were looking for cameras, guns, whiskey, illegal items, you know that kind of thing, but I don’t think we have had our car searched. Uncle Archie had his searched one time. He had a ‘39 Plymouth, which Marvin and Wesley painted about every two years, you remember that? Anyway, I remember he had little one wheel trailer, you know and he had some—my Granddad Hall raised bees and Uncle Archie got a couple [inaudible] bees from Granddaddy Hall and he bought him back and he had them wrapped with the canvas. And that somehow that canvas got lose on the way back and when he got to [inaudible] gate, the bees was all loose and them guards were—flagged them on through right quick. They said, “Get the hell out of here.”
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did your Uncle Archie live?
MR. SCHRADER: The first house he lived in was 102 Newkirk Lane, which is just top off of New York above Tennessee, Pennsylvania. That’s the first house I ever stayed in right there. I spent the first night in Oak Ridge right there in our house. Later, let’s see if I can get this right because he moved several times. Later, he moved to Maiden Lane, then he was up on Wellington Circle, then they moved down in to the new houses down off of Robertsville, and I think that’s the last house they lived in here in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned your mother shopped at a store on Robertsville. Where was that located?
MR. SCHRADER: The intersection—if you’re going down the hill from my house on Louisiana, when you got down to the intersection of Robertsville Road and Louisiana Avenue, you took a right and you go out there about three blocks and on the left was a large square store. And it was just a general store and it was here from the origin of Oak Ridge. It is now, I think a church and a meeting house, but back then, it was a store.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall who ran the store?
MR. SCHRADER: No, I don’t. I don’t know who owned it or who ran it. I just know it was there, and I bought a lot of bubble gum and took a lot of bottles and sold them to him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your family have a telephone?
MR. SCHRADER: No, there was only one on the street and the Brandon’s had it. We didn’t have one for a long time and then later on, we got one.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where you on the party line at that time when you got a phone?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t know. I didn’t talk on the phone much of that age, you know. I had a girlfriend lived out near Hilltop store. I’d go out there and see her, I didn’t never think about calling her, you know. I just go out there and see her.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever attend the skating rink at Jefferson?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about that.
MR. SCHRADER: What is there to tell? It was a skating rink and that’s where all the girls hung out, that’s where we went.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was it located?
MR. SCHRADER: It was located right there on the corner of the [Oak Ridge] Turnpike and what’s the name of that street? I don’t remember the name of that street.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Jefferson Circle?
MR. SCHRADER: No, Jefferson Circle was on up. It was right there on the—right across from where the Pilot Mini-Market is now; I guess you’d call it. It was sitting right there on that little hill right above the Turnpike.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is that across the street from where the Shell station is today?
MR. SCHRADER: Is that a Shell? I thought that was a Pilot? Okay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s a Shell station.
MR. SCHRADER: Okay, I don’t ever buy gas there so I don’t know. So, it was a Shell station?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you know what the inside of the skating rink looked like?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, they had a place where you could sit and change, you know put your skates on. You could rent skates or you could bring your own, of course, they had a big flat skating rink floor and was sort of fenced off, you know and they had a little concession stand where you could get snow cones, and Cokes, and that kind of thing and that was about the size of it. I think they had some restaurants.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about the museum that was located in the old cafeteria building across the street. Did you ever attend it?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, yeah, a lot of times. That was the Atomic Energy Museum back then, of course, they’ve done away with that. “Atomic” is a bad word now, so it’s a Science and Energy Museum over here on the hill behind the Civic Center—yeah, I went there a lot of times. Back then, they had the mockup of Little Boy and Fat Man in there. I remember that. I think they still got Little Boy over here at the new museum, [inaudible]. They had a lot of pictures in there of atomic bombs going off and pictures of Enola Gay and Box Car and those are the B-29’s that dropped the bombs. And they had a lot of things about nuclear medicine and what the promise of nuclear energy was and this kind of thing, and they had a lot of pamphlets, which I got a bunch of them [inaudible]. I cleaned out my garage. I’ve got stuff sitting over there, but I’ve got a bunch of those old pamphlets here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that a fun place to visit?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, and you used to get a radioactive dime. I’ve still got one or two of them. They won’t give them out anymore. They’re too dangerous, but back then they did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What school did you attend after you left—you came to Woodland and went through the 6th grade, finished the 6th grade in Woodland? And then where did you attend junior high?
MR. SCHRADER: Went to the original Robertsville School and it was the old Robertsville School where—I forgot what they call it [inaudible]? It was called Jefferson Junior High. It was Jefferson and I went there in the 7th grade, and then they were in process of re-doing that so they moved us up to the old high school up on Kentucky Avenue, and I went to the 8th grade at Kentucky, on Kentucky above Blankenship Field.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, you were pretty far away from there where you lived. Did you ride the bus to school?
MR. SCHRADER: Never rode the bus, I was always into Safety Patrol from the 6th grade on and when I was in the 7th grade, I was a lieutenant on the Safety Patrol, and then when I was in the 8th grade I was promoted to captain. So, my job was to get there early and get the entire patrolman out to escort people across the street and see that decorum was maintained and all that, you know, so I walked every day. I walked every day I went to Robertsville and I walked every day I went to junior high, I mean to Kentucky, because I had to get there early. I had to be there in time for the bus started getting there, you know and I had to have my people out doing—there at the crossings and where they needed to be.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, how did you become a Safety Patrol?
MR. SCHRADER: They just picked me. That’s all I can tell you.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, how were you different, did you have a different dress? How did people know you were the Safety Patrol?
MR. SCHRADER: We had a white belt that went around us and a strap that came over our shoulder and then if you were an officer, you had a badge commemorating what your status was; lieutenants were red and captains were blue. You were in the Safety Patrol, too, weren’t you?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes, I was.
MR. SCHRADER: That’s what I thought.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, you had kids in the Safety Patrol that would go out to the street crossings and see that they didn’t get hit by the cars and—
MR. SCHRADER: Right. That’s exactly right and, for instance, when I was at Kentucky Avenue, I had to help somebody down below the old Center Theater where Tennessee came across, that’s where the buses came and it was what we called the bus stop, which was sort of a shed like thing. I had to have one there, then I had have one up on Broadway where they had to cross to the school again. I mean, the road to get up the hill to go to school. I had to have one on Kentucky up at the top of the hill where they might be crossing coming to school and I had to have one down where the old library used to be.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was that located?
MR. SCHRADER: The old library was located off of Kentucky Avenue right above the tennis courts. Well, the tennis courts are still there. It was a Rec. Center back then and library.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What were some of the other jobs a Safety Patrol did?
MR. SCHRADER: Well we were sort of like hall monitors in a way. We also had to report any—we call them illegal activities with any fighting or—we had to break up the fights. I think that’s why I got to be picked for Safety Patrol because I was always big for my age. But, yeah we had to put the flag up and a lot time we had to see that the flag got put up because they picked different students to do it, you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the kids respect your authority?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, I was bigger than they were and I played football, so [inaudible].
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what grade did you play football?
MR. SCHRADER: 7th, 8th, and 9th.
MR. HUNNICUTT: While you were up in Jefferson on the hill?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember who your football coach was?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, Lord, yes. Nick Orlando was the head coach and John [inaudible] was the line coach, and I was tackle and guard, and center. So, I had John [inaudible]—John just died a couple of months ago.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of classes did you take when you went to junior high?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, we had what they called core, which was sort of a combination of a Homeroom, History and Sociology, I guess you’d say. We had shop. It was either wood working or metal working and that kind of thing. We had Phys. Ed. every day, you know and we had Art and Music, and that was about the size of what we did there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember who your music teacher was?
MR. SCHRADER: I remember her face, but I didn’t remember her name. I never did like Music. I’ll just put it to you.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your favorite subject in school?
MR. SCHRADER: Metal Shop. I like Shop, and John [inaudible] was a Shop teacher up at Jefferson and he taught wood working and I still got an old gun case that I made up. [Inaudible] for John, or when he was teaching.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How was the neighborhood in Woodland different than the neighborhood in Louisiana Avenue?
MR. SCHRADER: It was spread out more; you know the children were farther apart. Up there, you could walk out my front door, take about two steps, and go on to the next house, you know. The range, in fact the same boardwalk served both of us. It came down from Louisiana Avenue and [inaudible] off to the left and went up the steps. [Inaudible] veered off to the right and you could just walk around in their house. Everything was a lot closer than it was here in Woodland.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of house in Woodland did you live in?
MR. SCHRADER: I lived in a flattop, two bedroom flattop over on, 132 Northwestern Avenue.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what did the inside of that house look like?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, it had two doors, and it had a back door was on the left side of the house facing from the street and that went out to a garbage stand where you put your garbage cans and this can thing. And in the front door, you came in straight from the street. When you walked in, you walked in to living room. If you turned left, you went in to the kitchen and if you continued left, you went in to the furnace room, which is an oil converted coal furnace, really. Then, you could walk right out the back door and to the garbage collection area. If you continue straight as you went through the living room, the living room was essentially off to your right, if you went straight, you came in to a little hall way, which if you went right, you went in to a bedroom and a bathroom was to your left just off that bedroom. If you went to your left, you went into the master bedroom, which is bigger bedroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mention the heat was provided by—[inaudible] supplied by heat. Where did you keep the oil?
MR. SCHRADER: There was an oil tank buried in the ground and they would come out and fill the oil tank periodically and I dug mine up. I had a 240 gallon galvanized tank with a vent pipe and a fill pipe on it, which stuck up about 18 inches above the ground. They would fill it up every so often.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Who was they?
MR. SCHRADER: It wasn’t Roane-Anderson. What was the one that took over after Roane-Anderson? MSI, right. MSI was the one that come up and filled—
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have to pay each time they came to fill the tank up?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t know whether Dad had to pay or not. I don’t know. All I know, we were paying rent, and I don’t know whether that was included in the rent or not. I know when I was working, anytime I had a job, I had to pay 10 percent of whatever I earned as rent to my Mom and Dad, which I thought was awful, but it turned out to be alright.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what types of jobs did you have growing up?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, when I was—I went to work with public works when I was at 14. I worked at Woodson’s [inaudible] City Market. Do you know where that is? Woodson’s [Inaudible] City Market?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No, where is that?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, it’s right through the underpass on the old Clinton Road where the old Elza Drive-In used to be. It’s right there on the right and I worked there as a bag boy, and later on, I got promoted to Assistant Produce Handler. And through the summer I worked there six days a week.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How old were you when you worked there?
MR. SCHRADER: I was 14. They lied and said I was 16, so they could put it on my social security. I told you I was big for my age.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned Elza Drive-In; where was that located?
MR. SCHRADER: It was located right under the underpass, the railroad underpass. As you went under that, if you took an immediate right, you go down a little gravel road, and that was the Elza Drive-In Theater was right there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there any other restaurants out there in that area?
MR. SCHRADER: There was a beer joint right across the street, which I used to eat lunch at on Saturdays. But they’d make sandwiches and this kind of thing, but on Sundays they were closed because you couldn’t sell beer on Sundays. So, on Sundays they were closed, so I’d usually get maybe a quarter pound of bologna and some pork and beans and one of these big pickles on the stick, you know and eat outback of the store.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember home milk deliveries?
MR. SCHRADER: Lord, yes. In fact, when I was delivering papers, I used to stop the [inaudible] dairy man, especially in the summer time and steal ice, get ice from him. And he was a good ole guy. Sometimes, he’d save us a little carton of chocolate milk or whatever he had handy, you know we’d get it from him. I delivered the Knoxville Journal because it was a morning paper and it didn’t interfere with my football practice at night, so.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were you living in Woodland when you delivered the Journal?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, and the [Knoxville News] Sentinel.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about delivering papers in those days. How did you get the newspapers?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, mine came up on the corner of Gettysburg and Northwestern, and they just put them out there. You didn’t have plastic bags. You didn’t have rubber bands. You had to learn how to fold them and you didn’t get to fold them at the end of the driveway. You had to take them and make sure they got on the porch. And I remember—and another thing the routes were a lot bigger back then. I had 87 daily’s and 136 Sundays, so a lot of times, I’d have to make two or three trips and have that bag full and my arms loaded up, you know. And I would fold them up as I would go; you know and see if they got to where they were going.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was Wednesdays a bigger day than the rest of the week?
MR. SCHRADER: Seemed like it was Thursdays was a bigger day.
MR. HUNNICUTT: A lot of ads in the newspaper?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah. I was thinking it was Thursday.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get paid?
MR. SCHRADER: I got more money than the Sentinel did. I got 12 cents a customer per week, and I got 6 cents for Sunday customers. And like I said, I had 87 daily’s and 137 Sundays.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, how did you get the money from your customers?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, I had to go collect it. You went and collected it and entered it in a book. And then after you got it, the paper man gave you a bill, and you had to cover that bill and then what was left was yours. And I had all those row apartments down here, off of Purdue, you remember them?
MR. HUNNICUTT: The brick apartments?
MR. SCHRADER: The brick apartments. Boy, they were nice. I could go in there—I could get rid of a bunch of papers in a hurry, you know. I had from Northwestern down toward Manhattan and back then, where the Credit Union is now, there were apartments right there. I had from there, and then I had from there and then I had all of Marshall Circle, and of course, I had all of Purdue down through there. I had Marshall Circle, Nevada Circle, Gettysburg from Manhattan, up to Northwestern, and then that was it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did your mother shop when you lived in Woodland?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, there was Woodland Shopping Center right down here, which it had a grocery store. I think it was an A&P. Anyway, there was a grocery store, a Texaco service station, a drug store, and I think there was a barber shop and a beautician shop on down Manhattan. Well, it’s still there, you know you go down and see it. She did a lot of shopping there, and then back before Downtown was made, there was some shopping down there, which is what we used to call the Farmers Market area but they closed them down and made grocery stores. Smith; you remember [inaudible] Smith?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No.
MR. SCHRADER: You don’t remember him? Well, his dad owned a grocery store down there. He lived up on Newberry Circle. His dad owned a grocery store. I worked for him for a while.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Are you speaking of where Lizz’s Market used to be?
MR. SCHRADER: No, Lizz’s Market was down there, the old Pan-Am down where Nissan—well, I think she was down there in the beginning. The old WATO radio station was there. There was some kind of appliance store. I forgot the name of it, and there were two grocery stores. Smith had the one closest to the Turnpike and I worked there for him for a while, and I delivered papers for [inaudible] for a while. He delivered the Sentinel, and whenever he needed somebody to fill in for him, I’d deliver them.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about the Snow White Drive-In?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, I dated three girls from there. I remember that. It was the place to go, you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was it located?
MR. SCHRADER: It was located down off the Turnpike, near the Medical Arts building now where it is, or the Physician’s Plaza I think they call it. But, it was right there off the Turnpike. It had a circular drive all the way around it. People would go down there and drive all the way around that circle to see who was there and I had a motorcycle, and I would go down there, now this was after I was 18 or 19, I would go down there. Motorcycles were rare back then, and I had a 1956 Triumph 650cc Tiger 110, it was called and everybody liked that motorcycle, and of course, it was hopped up. I had flat tappets and racing springs and Q cams and TT racing carburetor on it, and it’d outrun about anything around here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you buy the motorcycle?
MR. SCHRADER: I bought it from Carroll Green.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was he located?
MR. SCHRADER: He was located down off of Jefferson at Green’s Cycle Shop. The cycle shop’s still down there, of course Carroll’s dead. Carroll just lived right around the corner from me on Quincy.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was he in the old Jefferson bus terminal building at one time?
MR. SCHRADER: No. Well, yes, he was. Yes, he was because the first motorcycle I bought was a 1949 Indian, and I bought it from Sam [inaudible], over here on Gettysburg. And Sam had torn the transmission out of it. Well, it had a bunch of needle bearing in it, and they’d come loose and got all through the transmission. So, I took that thing apart, and the main shaft in there was scored, and I took a set of my [inaudible]. It was about 14,000 [inaudible] and I took some emery paper and some emery cloth and polished that up as good as I could get it. I went down to old Dougherty’s down here on the Old Harriman Highway, outside of Oliver Springs, and I bought part of the transmission off of one of his and pressed them bearings out and cleaned them right good, and put them in there. And I got that motorcycle running. And I violated everything he told me. I put high detergent oil in it. They said, “That’ll mess it up,” you know. But anyway, I went down to Carroll Green’s and had him—that’s the first time I’d ever run into him. I went down there and had him order me a main shaft for that 1949 Indian, and he did. But that one I fixed stayed in there. When I sold that bike, I had given them the main shaft that I ordered from Green with it. It was still going strong.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Back at the Snow White Drive-In, do you recall what it looked like inside?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, it was like the Sonic, you know they had waitresses that come outside—car hops we called them. I never was in there very much. They had some booths in there, and I think it had a juke box. But most of the time, I stayed outside. I never even got in there much.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about the swimming pool? Did you attend the swimming pool during the summertime?
MR. SCHRADER: Lord, yes. I rode my bicycle down the hill from Louisiana Avenue to go to the swimming pool.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was the swimming pool located?
MR. SCHRADER: Grove Center, and it’s still there. It’s still a landmark and when I worked for [inaudible] later on, I had to go in there and clean that thing up before he’d open it up, you know. When I worked for the Recreation Department, I worked for them for three summers while I was going to school. Do you know Rabbit Yearwood?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MR. SCHRADER: You know, Margaret Yearwood?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No.
MR. SCHRADER: His daughter? I used to date his daughter. I’d get in trouble. I’d offer him a ride on my motorcycle, but he never would take it. He said, “You ain’t getting me on that damn thing.” I worked for Coach Green, he and Shep Lauder, and we had a bunch of summer help, you know. And I would coach on the playground and then later on, I’d be what they’d call a Rec. Attendant, which I got to mow the grass, line the ball fields, and take care of anything that needed to be taken care of.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the playgrounds at the schools that they had in the summertime.
MR. SCHRADER: Well, we had a playground program. It usually ran for about 10 weeks. I was coach on the first playground at Glenwood.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How old did you have to be to be a playground instructor?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t know if they had an age limit. I was going to college, I know that. And see Dorothy Tate, you remember her, who used to coach Oak Ridge Women’s Basketball?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MR. SCHRADER: She was the lady coach. We had a man and a woman and we had—I think I had three softball teams; one girls and two boys. I had senior boys and junior boys and I had [inaudible] and Howie Moss was on the senior boys.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did each school compete against each other? Did playground schools compete against each other?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah. Yeah, we had a whole league that we played against. We played against Scarboro, we played against all the other playgrounds. And I started the girl’s ball team at Glenwood. I had to go down to Glenwood one year, and I started a girl’s ball team down there, and it was pitiful. They didn’t win a game but they won one game by forfeit, but the next year, they were the city champions.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What other type of activities did the kids have other than softball?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, when I was going to school, we shot marbles a lot, but the schools decided that was too much like gambling because we were shooting them for keeps. But, we’d play marbles, [inaudible], Pigs Eye, and later on when I was coaching on the playground, the Elks had a marble tournament. I had to teach the kids how to shoot marbles because they didn’t know anything about it, you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, tell me how you shoot marbles.
MR. SCHRADER: Well, first off you draw a circle and usually it’s about 4-5, or 6 feet in diameter. You put all the marbles—you have to bag or [inaudible] your marbles up. You put them out in the center, and then you have a shooting marble, which we called a [inaudible]. And you drew a straight line and you lagged for the line to see who got to shoot first and what you did you got at a set distance and you shoot whoever and whoever closest to the line got to shoot first. Then, you had to shoot from the circle, where the marbles were, you put your last knuckle on the line. That’s as far as you could get in and then, any marbles that you knocked out were yours. Now, if your [inaudible] stayed in the circle, you had to holler “[inaudible].” That meant that you got to stay in the circle, you got to shoot again, and you got doubles or triples, or anything you got. If you didn’t say it fast enough, you had to get out of the circle and any marbles you got, you shot—you got to keep.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have a favorite type marble you liked to shoot?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, Lord. I’d drive all over Oak Ridge to get them. I had one I called cherry [inaudible], I had Steelies. Steelies were actually big ball bearings about so big, you know, and a lot of time they didn’t want you to use Steelies because they would always stick and would always knock out whatever they’d hit.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now was this in a dirt playing area?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah. It was just all dirt. Yeah, you’d just scrape out a flat place on the dirt. In fact, up on Louisiana Avenue, I had a place up there and shot marbles. People would come from all over the neighborhood to shoot marbles with me. I was usually pretty good at it. I had a whole chest full of marbles that I’d won.
In fact, when I married my second wife, my brother-in-law lived up on the hill. The first thing I did was buy a little bag of marbles and took them up there to him. I said, “Now, I’m going to marry your sister. I’m not giving you all of your marbles back, but here are some of them.” I’d give him his marbles back.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember when they dropped the bomb in 1945? Were you old enough to remember that day?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, where were you and what did you remember?
MR. SCHRADER: I was up on Louisiana Avenue. Dad went to work and he told us to be sure to listen to the radio that day and strangely enough, I just realized here a month or two ago that I came here exactly one year before the atomic bomb was dropped. I came here on August 6, 1944. It was dropped on August 6, 1945. But anyway, I remember Dad telling us to be sure and listen to the radio. We had the radio on all day long, which we usually didn’t do that. Mom’ll listen to the soap operas and that was about it and I wasn’t in the house. But, I listened that day, and they told about the new weapon and its devastating power. I don’t remember whether they called it the atomic bomb or not, but I remember the day. The day that they broadcast and told us that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think your mother knew what your father’s job was; what he did?
MR. SCHRADER: No.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever remember him talking about his job?
MR. SCHRADER: No. He wouldn’t tell you diddly about it and he didn’t tell me much about it until I went to work at [inaudible]. He just didn’t talk about those kind of things. He still doesn’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about in March of 1949, when they opened the gates to the city? What do you remember about that celebration?
MR. SCHRADER: I saw some of my first airplanes that day. I laid out there on top of the coal box and watched that DC-3 fly around all over Oak Ridge, and I remember going down to Jackson Square or Downtown, we called it Downtown then. And they had a parade down there. I forgot that guy’s name. He used to have the “Queen for a Day” program on the radio.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Jack Bailey?
MR. SCHRADER: That’s it. Jack Bailey; he was here and Rod Cameron. He was a western movie actor and some other dignitaries. I think [inaudible] was here. I always liked Estes. He always sort of reminded me of Abraham Lincoln without a beard.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you stand when you watched the parade?
MR. SCHRADER: I was all over the place. I was 11 years old. I wasn’t tied to any one spot. I think I started off down there at the bus terminal, there on Tennessee and then I went from there up on top of the hill, up where the brick walk is now, you know, next to the [inaudible] Theater. I went everywhere. I wasn’t just one place.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there a lot of people in the Jackson Square?
MR. SCHRADER: Quite a few, quite a few, yeah, and a lot of cars were there. Like I say, there weren’t a lot of cars back then, but boy, they all come together when that happened.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned your mother used to listen to soap operas on the radio. You mentioned that “Queen for a Day.” What was that?
MR. SCHRADER: That was a program where they would pick out some lady—I don’t know whether they picked them out of the audience or not. I didn’t listen that much. Anyway, they would pick her out and make her queen for a day, and she got all kinds of prizes and trips and whatever. She would listen to— one of her favorites was “Ma Perkins.” When “Ma Perkins” came on, I left and “Days of Our Lives” was on back then and “Stella Dallas”. And there were about three or four that she listed to. I listened to “Dick Tracy”, “Lone Ranger”, “Eddy Arnold”, “The Shadow.” Those were the radio programs that I listened to.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember when you first got a TV set?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes, I sure do. It was right over here on 132 Northwestern Avenue.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How was the reception?
MR. SCHRADER: Not very good. Mr. Adams who was a shop teacher at the high school, you remember him? He lived up on the hill behind us. Now, he had a huge mess. You know, he’d get [inaudible] and a lot of places when they came on the air. I don’t know if [inaudible] was on back then or not. But we could only get two stations, that was Channel 6 and Channel 10 and it was all travelogues and old movies and this kind of thing. The only NBC and ABC and CBS station was—my dad would hurry home from work to see this was “Pinky Lee” and “Howdy Doody”. That was the only syndicated programs. The rest of the time, it was travelogues and test patterns. We had a lot of test patterns.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what was on the test patterns?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, it was an Indian facing to the left and then a bunch of grids, different grids, and that kind of thing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your favorite cowboy?
MR. SCHRADER: My favorite cowboy? Well, I had several favorites, but I liked Sunset Carson and I like Wild Bill Elliott. Those were my two favorites, you know they were more realistic. I didn’t care much for singing cowboys. Like I told you, I didn’t like music too much so, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, they were alright, but when they started singing, I’d turn them off.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever visit the Midtown Shopping Center?
MR. SCHRADER: Lord, yes. All the time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me where that was located.
MR. SCHRADER: It’s located right about where the Civic Center is now and Oak Ridge Public Library. It was located right there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what stores were in the shopping center?
MR. SCHRADER: There was a pharmacy or drug store, there was a grocery store, there was a movie theater there, which Mom never would let me go to.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Why was that?
MR. SCHRADER: They always had a cutting and a shooting because they had a place there that sold beer, Rec. Hall like thing. I didn’t get to go there, ever. I don’t think I was ever in that movie theater at all.
MR. HUNNICUTT: She thought it was a rough place to visit?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, she thought it was too bad, but now, we had a Rec. Hall down in Jefferson, down where the market is now, you know, [inaudible] market. There was a rec hall down there and a power station, a steam plant and the steam plant provided steam all the way up the Turnpike for all those dormitories. Of course, that museum you were talking about, all of those areas were heated by that steam. Jefferson was heated by that steam.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the steam lines coming across the Turnpike and going to the different dormitories?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, yeah. I remember there was a steam plant at Jefferson, like I say, and the steam lines were wrapped, you know about 12 inches worth of asbestos around them, to keep them from [inaudible]. I think they went underground a lot of times. Then, there was one right on the corner of Georgia. There’s a steam plant right there on the corner of Georgia and the Turnpike and there’s one down in east end of town. I didn’t go down there much.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you mean the far east of town?
MR. SCHRADER: The far eastern end of town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Towards Elza Gate?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, it was down in there. I think it was located—I’m not sure about this now, I think it was located down about where the refuse center is now, but I’m not sure. It was down there about somewhere because on Arkansas and across there, there was a bunch of places that had to be heated.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were in high school and you were dating, did you have dating rules or where did you go on your dates and how did you get there?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, when I was in junior high, I went to the movies most of the time. If you never been in a Safety Patrol, once a month you’d get free theater tickets. You remember that?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No.
MR. SCHRADER: Maybe you had to be an officer, I don’t know but anyway, for serving on the Safety Patrol, you’d get theater tickets and if you talked right, you could get two of them, and I’d take my girlfriend to the movies about once a month. When I got a motorcycle, of course, I went anywhere I wanted to. But that wasn’t in high school. I actually moved from Oak Ridge in 1954, and went to Loudon. Dad decided they weren’t going to sell these houses, and we moved down to Loudon, and I finished my junior and senior year from Loudon High School.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, what did you notice different when you when went to Loudon High School then the Oak Ridge high school?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, Lord. There was a world of difference. First off, you didn’t have to take Phys. Ed. every day, and since I never had Health, the state had a requirement you had to have Health. So, for six weeks I had Health and then for six weeks I had Physical Education, which was a joke down there. Here, they had something for you to do. Down there, they just turned you lose in the gym. But they had state requirements. You had to have Math, at least one year of Math; you had to have one year of American History; you had to have one year of Civics; and you have to have one year of Science to graduate in the state requirements. Of course, I had the Math. I had Math here and then I had Math down there, so I had four years of Math, and I loved American History; in Science, I had four years of Science.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think the Oak Ridge school system was ahead of the school system you attended after leaving Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, yes. Much farther; better equipment—well, when I was here, my sophomore year, I was president of the Biology Club under Mr. Asher and we had clubs. They didn’t have those down at Loudon. They didn’t have a Biology Club or a Chess Club. They didn’t have any of those kinds of things and they had a lot of absenteeism. A lot of those people were farmers, and when they needed the kids to help with the harvest or putting up tobacco or whatever, they’d be gone. But the teachers were good.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever visit the Oak Ridge Hospital for any reason?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, I visited it a lot of times. I had a friend of mine, Ed Pollard, caught polio. Did you ever know Ed Pollard?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MR. SCHRADER: Remember, he went on to MIT, but he got polio and back then, in the old hospital, of course, he was in the contagion ward, they wouldn’t let you in. I would go stand outside the window and talk to Ed; and Ed and I like flying. So after we delivered papers on Saturday morning, a lot of times we would hitchhike out to the Oak Ridge Airport down at Oliver Springs and we do whatever jobs we could do just to get flying time. We’d clean airplanes; we’d change oil, and do all kind of things.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you said hitchhike, tell me how that works.
MR. SCHRADER: You go out and stand on the side of the road and hold your thumb out and somebody will come along and pick you up. Back in those days, hitchhiking was a very common thing. Did you ever see the movie, “It Happened One Night?”
MR. HUNNICUTT: No.
MR. SCHRADER: You didn’t? Well that’s Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and they were hitchhiking and she used a technique of raising her skirt so a guy could see her legs, and they’d stop and give them a ride. But that was common. There were a lot of soldiers coming back from the war, and a lot of people moving around and that kind of thing and we’d stop and pick them up. We’d go out and catch a ride up to Hilltop and then we’d stand on the road, hitchhike until somebody would picked us up, we go down to the airport. Sometimes they’d take us all the way to the airport, sometimes they’d let us off at [inaudible] Store up there and we’d walk the rest of the way.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you feel safe living in Oak Ridge, growing up here?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, sure did; sure did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have to lock your doors or cars or anything?
MR. SCHRADER: We never locked the door. I don’t think they had ever locked the car until somebody burned a hole in his seat. Dad bought a ’51 Oldsmobile. I think they called it the Dynamic Eighty-Eight, and he left the window down and somebody flipped a cigarette and it landed in the car seat and it burned a hole about that big around in the car seat, then he started locking it and rolling the windows up then, after he got the seat repaired.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the Police Department in the early days, when you were young and running around town?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there a lot of policemen?
MR. SCHRADER: There was a fair amount, but there was a lot of Army people too, or National Guard. Up where I lived on Louisiana Avenue, one of the training areas, The National Guard would come out there and they would go out G Road—remember I was telling you about earlier and I don’t know what they did out there but they did a lot of training and that kind of thing. You’d see whole convoys, I guess you’d call them, going out there. And they had several armored cars, which was six-wheel armored vehicles where they looked like a 37 mm cannon on them and some machine gun ports. You’d see quite a few of those, and they were up around Louisiana all the time and they had some equestrian guards who would ride the fences if they didn’t have roads near. They had some of those. They guarded the place pretty well. It was well guarded. The police, well I went through the police station one time. They took Safety Patrol through the police station. It was down here what they called the Tunnell Building now. It used to be the gas company building, but that was the old original police station and they had an armory in it. I remember they took us in through the armory and they had a bunch of Tommy guns in there. I was really impressed with those Tommy guns because you see them in the movies all where the gangsters and everybody have them. And the police had plenty of them. But there were quite a few police, in fact the first guy I saw when I came into Oak Ridge that night—I told you I came in that ’39 Plymouth station wagon and it was raining, and right there on the corner, next to the police station, there was a pyramid thing in the middle of the road, and it had black and white stripes on it. And there was a policeman standing on that and it must have been 10 or 11 o’clock at night, in the rain directing traffic. There wasn’t any traffic lights, you know and a lot of the Turnpike was gravel. It was just two lanes and he was standing out there directing traffic, and there wasn’t that much traffic around. That’s the first Oak Ridger, I guess, I saw.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the doctors coming to your house and making home visits?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, yeah, yeah, I sure do. I remember Dr. Preston, he turned out to be a baby doctor. I don’t know what you call him and I remember one time I got some kind of kidney infection; of course I lived in the woods. I ate everything I can get hold of in the woods, you know. People go out in woods, they’d starve to death. I ate everything out there, but anyway, I got some kind of kidney infection from something I ate. What was that old doc’s name? He come up there—he’d come visit me and I had to drink this big whole bottle of liquid, and he’d bring it. You didn’t have to go to the drug store and get it. He brought and it was an awful tasting stuff, but I had to drink it. He came four or five times, but that’s the only time I remember.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, when you graduated from high school, did you go to college?
MR. SCHRADER: I went to UT [University of Tennessee].
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then when did you come back to Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, Mom and Dad came back the year I graduated from high school, 1956. They came back that December and bought a house over here on Pratt Lane, or moved into the house before the government sold them. I was away at school. I stayed in South Stadium Hall over there. So, I guess, I came back in 1957; first time I was back.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you meet your wife?
MR. SCHRADER: I met my first wife down in Loudon. My next door neighbor, she came down—my next door neighbor had five children, and she would come down every summer and babysit the children [inaudible] and Shelton would take a little vacation or whatever and that’s where I met her, right there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you all have children?
MR. SCHRADER: We had two children.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Boys or Girls?
MR. SCHRADER: Girls; both of them are girls. Lisa Marie and Angela Gayle.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you and your first wife live in Oak Ridge or Loudon?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes, we lived here in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your children go through the Oak Ridge school system?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes, they did. In fact, they went down here to Woodland and they had the same teacher I had. I had John [inaudible] in junior high, both of them. I think [inaudible] taught English to Lisa and Social Studies to Angie. They still fuss at me about this one, and they’re 50 and 48. But, I caught them fighting one time, I mean they were fist fighting, hurting themselves and I thought, “Well, spanking them is not going to help them any.” So, I said, “Well, I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you some togetherness time.” “What’s that, Daddy?” I said, “You’re going to have to go to school together, you’re going to have to come home together.” I said, “If one of you is invited over to somebody’s house, the other has to be invited or you can’t go.” “Oh, wow, that’s going to be a piece of cake,” they thought. They wasn’t going to get a whipping either. About three or four days later, the youngest one came to me and she said, “Daddy, how long does this togetherness last?” I said, “It lasts until you learn how to get along together.” Do you know it was about a month ago that my oldest one was still fussing at me, “That togetherness stuff was awful, Daddy.” I said, “You learned how to get along.”
MR. HUNNICUTT: As you saw your children go through the Oak Ridge school system, were there any indication they had it any better than you did, or about the same, or how would you describe their school days?
MR. SCHRADER: I think they had access to better equipment. Well, for one thing, they got to use hand calculators in school and that kind of thing, which I think helped them conquer the ideas rather than just the nitty-gritty of it, so to speak. So, I think they benefitted in that way and I think—it wasn’t as structured as it was back when I was going to school. Like I say, you took music, you took art, you took Phys. Ed. and grammar [inaudible] and that was it and of course, in high school, you had a lot of clubs and that kind of thing. They had benefits to that, too. And I think they learned really well. I know the youngest one got in the Beta Club, and Lisa, you know, there’s sibling rivalry there. Oh, that just tore Lisa up. She went to work and she got in the Beta Club, you know because she couldn’t have baby sister beat her out. So, it benefitted them both, yeah. In Loudon, I don’t think they had a Beta Club down there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you like best about living in Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: The convenience. It’s disappearing, but in the early days, you could get on a bus and go from one end of Oak Ridge to the other just by getting a transfer. No bus service. There was complete safety, you know, the whole place was fenced in and guarded. It’s not that way anymore. When I went to high school here, there were only two people in Oak Ridge High School who had automobiles. One of them was Dick Green, and the other one was—I forgot that boy’s name, he had a ’47 DeSoto, and he worked in Diversified, what we called Diversified Occupations; where he went to school half a day and worked half a day and had to have a car here. Students didn’t have cars and you walked everywhere you went. They had bus service, but a lot of times only the sissies rode the buses, you know. That’s the truth.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is there anything we hadn’t talked about that you’d like to talk about?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes. I think the recreational system here in Oak Ridge was far superior than anywhere I’ve seen. Because like I say, I coached on the playground for three years; I was a recreational attendant for a year, and we had Shep Lauder who had Babe Ruth’s baseball team. We had rec halls all over, we had rec halls at Jefferson, we had rec halls at Grove Center; one of them is still up at Jefferson and still sort of a bar and social club up there. That was one of the original ones, but it’s been done over. We had five movie houses. We had the Jefferson, we had Grove, we had Center, we had the Ridge, and Midtown. And of course, movies were the primary entertainment source back in those days. We had tennis. We had two good tennis courts; one up where I was telling you about at Jackson Square, and one down at Jefferson. Of course, they sold it off to the Girl’s Club and they did away with that one. But we had horseshoes, we have all kinds of extra activities. We had hobby clubs. We had a hobby shop. We had bridge clubs. I had all kinds of board games. You could go up to the old library, up off of Kentucky, you could go up there and get checkers, chess, Monopoly, you can get all kind of board games and play them right there. Those kinds of things don’t exist anymore and that was what was better. But, now, television has taken over a lot of that. That’s one of the things—I still like what’s left. There are still horseshoe places up near the old Wildcat Den, and I think there are still horseshoe pits over by the tennis courts.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about Wildcat Den? Where was that located?
MR. SCHRADER: Wildcat Den was located right there at the very end of Robertsville where it comes into the Turnpike and from the Turnpike, it was on the right hand side of the road. We just had a class reunion there, did you go? What year did you graduate?
MR. HUNNICUTT: ’62.
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, we had 1954, 1955, and 1956. They still invite me to the reunions even though I graduated from Loudon, but I went to school with them for 10 years, so I still get—
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that a gathering place for the young high school students?
MR. SCHRADER: That’s exactly what it was for. They had pool tables and card tables and games and a dance floor and a little stage. I don’t remember any bands we had. We probably had some local bands come and play and sort of a concession stand and that kind of thing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, it’s been my pleasure to interview you and I think your oral History will be a tribute to the history of Oak Ridge. And I thank you for your time.
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, you’re welcome.
[End of Interview]

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ORAL HISTORY OF HOWARD W. SCHRADER
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
November 12, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview is for the Center of Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is November 12, 2012. I am Don Hunnicutt in the home of Mr. Howard Wayne Schrader, 196 Northwestern Avenue, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take an oral history about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Please state your full name, date of birth, and place of birth.
MR. SCHRADER: Howard Wayne Schrader. Date of birth June 5, 1938. I was born in Pulaski, Virginia, in the Pulaski Hospital.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall your father’s place of birth? And would you state his name also?
MR. SCHRADER: I do. My father’s name was Allan Marzell Schrader. He was born in Ivanhoe, Virginia, on April 26, 1909.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your mama’s name?
MR. SCHRADER: My mother’s name was Alma Marie Hall Schrader, of course and she was born in Pulaski, Virginia, May 12, 1915.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father’s school history, do you recall?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, of course, he graduated high school, then he went on and did some night courses for two years. I forgot the name of that correspondence school but it was well-known.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your mother’s school history?
MR. SCHRADER: High school, only.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of work did your father do?
MR. SCHRADER: He was assistant general foreman at Y-12 when he retired in the Maintenance Division.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Prior to coming to Y-12 in Oak Ridge, what was your father’s job?
MR. SCHRADER: He was a machinist for Hercules Powder Company in Radford, Virginia.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your mother work?
MR. SCHRADER: No, never did work. Well, she did before I was born, I’m sorry about that. She worked at the knitting mill there in Virginia at Pulaski, but I after I was born, she didn’t work.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you have brothers and sisters?
MR. SCHRADER: No.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Why did your father come to Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: He got dissatisfied, he was frozen on the job there at the Hercules Powder Company because it was war time critical job and he got aggravated at the way he was getting treated. My Uncle Archie had come to Oak Ridge as a carpenter and built a lot of these houses and he told Daddy about the [inaudible] and Dad came down and hired in on April 1, 1944.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your mom come with your father when he came?
MR. SCHRADER: No, he came by himself and stayed with my Uncle Archie Hall for about three or four months, and finally I came down. My first trip to Oak Ridge was August 6, 1944.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how they got to Oak Ridge, in means of transportation?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, they came in a ‘39 Plymouth Station wagon.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was the first home that your parents lived in, in Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: 360 Louisiana Avenue.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of house was that?
MR. SCHRADER: It’s what we use to call a flattop. It’s pre-fabricated in three sections and shipped out on back of a truck and then they put all three sections together on a set of stilts. I took a picture of it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of heating did a flattop have?
MR. SCHRADER: Coal stove.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get your coal?
MR. SCHRADER: Roane-Anderson brought it to us and we had a little coal house up near of the road and they would bring it and keep that coal house full of coal.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did you do with the ashes that you took out of the coal stove?
MR. SCHRADER: We dumped them out in the yard.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe the inside of the flattop. What did it look like?
MR. SCHRADER: Ours was furnished, 2 bedrooms; it had a coal stove and inside, behind the stove was a corrugated asbestos wall between the stove and the kitchen. As you came up the steps, you entered in directly into the living room, and off to the right of the living room was the pantry and the kitchen. And the kitchen was furnished with a three burner electric stove, and a refrigerator, and then in the living room, when you came directly in, had a folding table with two [inaudible] that would fold up, and then you can seat about eight people around it if you needed to. And had a couch, no chair except the chairs for the table and there was four chairs that went with the table. And then as you proceed, if you came directly through the door, walked past the stove on your right and went right back, the first door to your right was the bathroom and then diagonally from where you came in was one bedroom, and then to the left was another bedroom. That was it; that was all of it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how your mother washed clothes when she was living in the flattop, or were you too young?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh I recall, we had an easy washing machine and it was an old wringer type washing machine, you know, you put the clothes into the tub part and it would wash the clothes around and then after you finished that you have to rinse them and then you ran them through the wringer to dry. And then you took them outside and hung them on the clothesline to dry.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What were the wringers? What did they consist of?
MR. SCHRADER: They were two rubber rollers that were mounted horizontally on a pivoting arm that would pivot over the tub. And as you rinse the clothes with fresh water, you would take them out of there and feed them in to the wringer, and the wringer was powered so it would pull the clothes through the wringer, and of course, you had to have a washtub behind it to catch the damp clothes in, and they were ready to go outside and hang on the lines.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, where was the washing machine located in the flattop?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, it was on wheels. We usually put it back in the pantry until she’s ready to wash. When she’s ready to wash, she’d roll it out the kitchen where she could get to the water.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Hook up to the faucet for water?
MR. SCHRADER: You didn’t hook it up, you took a pan and filled it with the pan.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mention you hung the clothes out on the clothesline. What was the clothesline? How was that [inaudible]?
MR. SCHRADER: Clothesline was a couple of posts. I used to put them in for Granddad Cecil. People needed them. They were posts to put in the ground and usually they have anywhere from two to four lines stretched between two posts about 50 to 60 feet apart. And they were about 6 foot off the ground, 5 foot, you know, high enough where a lady could reach them and many times, after you hung a bunch of clothes on them, they would sag and we had a prop usually a long stick or some kind that you’d sit under there to hold the clothesline up.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you attach the clothes to the clothesline, just lay them over the line or—
MR. SCHRADER: Well, in some cases, but most cases, you use clothes pins, and clothes pins were wooden clips that you can pinch on the back end and open the front end and slide down over the clothes and then release it and they would clamp around the line and the clothes. The other clothes pin types were just wedge type. They were about 6 to 8 inches long and they just had a slot in them that was cut on the taper and you slip it down until that slot would hold the clothes on the line.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what the flattop material was made of?
MR. SCHRADER: Plywood, most of it was just plywood.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Windows so you could open for ventilation?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, we had windows all around like in that picture? Of course, you see the picture windows there on the living room, but then all around the house there were little square windows about like that and they were on a pivot. They pivoted in and out. They didn’t slide up and down like most windows. They pivoted in and out and—.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, that picture indicates the sidewalk was made out of wood. Is that the way your sidewalk was made?
MR. SCHRADER: Wooden sidewalk.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year—how old were you when you lived in the flattop?
MR. SCHRADER: 6 years old.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And you lived there how long?
MR. SCHRADER: We moved to Woodland in 1950. We moved to 132 Northwestern Avenue.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, Woodland is another section of Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: That was the last section that the government built in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what was the school name that you attended in?
MR. SCHRADER: The first school I attended was Highland View where the Children’s Museum is now.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that kindergarten?
MR. SCHRADER: No, I never went to kindergarten, I went to the first grade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And you moved from there to Woodland?
MR. SCHRADER: And Miss McMillan, I think was my teacher [inaudible]. They finish building the Old Linden School, so the 2nd grade I went to Linden.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was Linden School located, do you recall?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes, it was down below Lehigh Lane. I forgot the name of that road.
MR. HUNNICUTT: LaSalle?
MR. SCHRADER: LaSalle, that’s it. And on LaSalle, there’s a bunch of soccer fields there now. They’ve torn the whole thing down. They built a new Linden school but it was right there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about going to school at either Highland View or Linden School?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, I remember my first grade teacher was Miss McMillan at Highland View. She drove a 1938 black Buick. I got my first spanking the first day I went and my dad had a rule if I got spanked at school, I got spanked at home. So, I got two spankings that day.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did you do to require a spanking?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, this little girl, we were in line and this little girl pushed me out of line and I pushed her back, but the teacher didn’t see that little girl push me, but she saw me push the little girl. So, I got a couple of whacks there and—
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, when you went home did you tell your dad you had gotten a spanking?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t have to. Miss McMillan had already told him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where your parents strict on you?
MR. SCHRADER: Not overly so, they made sure I minded, but you know, they didn’t beat me every day or anything like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So after attending Linden School, you moved to the Woodland address?
MR. SCHRADER: I moved to Woodland in the 6th grade and I finished the last half of the 6th grade down here in Woodland School.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, you attended Linden up to the 6th grade, is that correct?
MR. SCHRADER: Through half of the 6th grade. It was from the 2nd grade to half of the 6th grade, I went to Linden. And then we moved over here in January of 1950, and I finished the last half of the 6th grade, we were in Woodland.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember some of the classes you took when you were in school?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t know, well yeah, at Linden, Miss Phillips was my 2nd grade teacher. I fell in love with her. I had a crush on her and we had music, we had physical education-gym, what we called gym. That was about the sum of the grammar school courses and—
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, how do you get back and forth [inaudible]?
MR. SCHRADER: We had art. I’m sorry, I had art, too.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get back and forth from your home to school?
MR. SCHRADER: Walked.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you take your lunch to school?
MR. SCHRADER: No, I went home to eat lunch every day.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember how long they gave you for lunch?
MR. SCHRADER: I think it was 45 minutes, but I’m not sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, when you live at 360 Louisiana Avenue and you went to Linden School, how far away would that be?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, be right from here to Wal-Mart [inaudible].
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, you have to hurry and walk home and eat and hurry back in 45 minutes?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, well I hurried everywhere back then, you know. I walked down the hill, walked down Lehigh Lane and then there was a path through the woods and I walked down there and I’d be at school in seven or eight minutes, you know it didn’t take long at all.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have a bicycle?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes, I did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you every ride the bicycle to school?
MR. SCHRADER: Not to school too much, but I rode it all over Oak Ridge and anywhere else I wanted to. Back then, people didn’t take their kids to school in cars, in fact, most families didn’t have a car. A lot of them [inaudible] had one car.
I remember we had a ’41 Plymouth, 2 door sedan and even then Dad carpooled to work. You know, there was four guys in the carpool including him and a lot of people up there where we lived didn’t have automobiles, you know. So, we rode the bus or you rode your bicycle.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your dress code? Did you wear, what clothing did you wear when you went in school?
MR. SCHRADER: Blue jeans and a shirt, most of the time. Every now and then Mom made me wear shorts, I hated that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have lace up shoes?
MR. SCHRADER: Mostly, it was tennis shoes, lace up shoes, yeah. Sometimes, she’d make me wear dress shoes, but they were lace up too.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, these tennis shoes, were they like what we call tennis shoes today?
MR. SCHRADER: No, no. They were black with the white soles around them and they came up ankle high and they laced all the way.
MR. HUNNICUTT: High top shoes?
MR. SCHRADER: High top tennis shoes, right and that was the only kind available. There wasn’t any other kind.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did your mother do her grocery shopping when you lived on Louisiana Avenue?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, the days that she had a car, if she needed to she’d go—we didn’t do a whole lot of grocery shopping. We had a—after they opened the gates, was a rolling store that came by which was a converted bus and they would have perishables like milk, eggs, and bread and that kind of thing and a few vegetables and she’d get whatever perishables she needed and then we had people to come around like [inaudible] and they would bring coffee and soap powder and a lot of things like that. So, it was a lot of door to door action, you know, Bunny Bread came in the bread truck, [inaudible], what else?
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about vacuum cleaner salesman?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, yeah. I remember we bought an Electrolux vacuum cleaner from my Uncle Archie, selling them on the side.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that the first vacuum cleaner your mother ever owned?
MR. SCHRADER: No, no. She had a Singer Upright and a Singer Hand Vac, and she had it, she brought that from Virginia when she came down.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how your mother saw Oak Ridge when she first got here?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, she thought it was terrible-mud everywhere. In fact, when I moved to Louisiana Avenue, it wasn’t even paved all the way to the top of the hill. I remember the first old 1938 Ford Army bus, it was painted all in drab. It was our first bus come up there and I remember him spinning on that gravel trying to get up the road and there wasn’t any sidewalks, other than boardwalks to the street. That was it.
Later, they came in and built boardwalks down the side of the street. We had a water tower up the end of the street that’s still there by the way and that was the end of Oak Ridge. You know, from the water tower, West Outer Drive turned into Louisiana, and from there we had what we called G-Road, which was a gravel road and G stand for Guard road and it was all gravel too. They never did pave that until they finally extended Outer Drive, you know West Outer Drive. There was a Girl Scout Camp out, oh, maybe a quarter mile from the water tower on the right, and then as you went on out the road, the road turned down the hill, went down toward Robertsville and right there were it turned, there was a [inaudible] out there and they had piled it up with a bunch of stumps that they moved there.
We call that the ‘stump dump’. We would break in to the Girl Scout Camp routinely, when they weren’t there and out on the top of the hill, we had a trail, as the road turned down to go down Robertsville, we had a trail [inaudible] and there was an apple orchard up there. And when the apples were green, we didn’t wait until they were ripe. You know, while there still green, we’d go up there and raid that apple orchard.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What were some of the games that the neighborhood kids played in those days?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, softball was the big game. Back in those days, there were two roads that no longer exist up there. There was Lenox Circle and Lenox Place, and right directly across from Lehigh Lane, if you’re coming to Louisiana, it was on the left side directly across the lane. If you went straight up, you went into Lenox Place and about half way up the hill you could turn back to the right, parallel to Louisiana. And that was Lenox Circle and it went down and circled around and came back on [inaudible]. And those are all gone now. They tore down all the houses and everything and filled it in and sold it all. But, the point was right behind Lenox Place, they had made the cut like they were going to bring the road back into Louisiana but they never did, and that was our soft ball field. And on one side of the cut, we had dug a fox hole, of course that was during the war time, you know.
So, we played Army and war all the time, and on the other side we built a triangular tree house about 6 or 8 feet off the ground and that was a pirate ship, you know. So, we played softball, we played Army, we played cowboys and Indians, we played whatever was playing at the local theater is what we played, you know. We went to Jefferson Theater every Saturday and right across the road from us, right below the water tower was a big open field and they used that field for mixing sand and gravel, and all the paving and everything they were doing. And those guys would drink a lot of Cokes, and Pepsis, and RC’s, and back in those days, you could get two cents deposit on each bottle.
So, we’d go over there every day and we’d collect up all of the Coke bottles that we could find and then we’d go down to the Robertsville store, which is a church now I think, and we’d trade them in for a two cents apiece. It cost nine cents to get into Jefferson Theater. So, every Saturday, we had have at least a dime, we go down to buy tickets for nine cents and had a penny left over for candy or gum or whatever we was going to get there, and that’s the way we went every Saturday whatever it was, and it was always a double feature with a serial.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you mean by serial?
MR. SCHRADER: Serial was about 12 or 15 chapters of some adventure, you know like, I remember Batman and Robin and The Scarlet Horseman, and Don Winslow and the Navy, and those serials always ended with a hero and some terrible distress and you had to go back next week so if he got out of it, you know.
But, whatever the serial was, that’s what we played until the next one came along and then we played that one, you know. So we had about 12-15 weeks of Robin Hood, and we had about 12-15 weeks as a Scarlet Horseman and whatever was playing Superman and whatever, you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of movie did they show in the main features?
MR. SCHRADER: Mostly, it was Westerns, but every now and then they’d have a mixture, and sometimes they’d have what they call a ‘Cartoon Carnival’, which they’d show you about 6 or 8 cartoon features. And the main thing we would go for on Saturday morning at 11 o’clock, they have what they call the Little Atoms Club, that was a radio program that was staged there from Jefferson stage and we would go down and they’d have different—well, we thought they were celebrities; they’d have yo-yo kings, you know these Filipinos they could really yo-yo, and then at 11:30, they went on the air. You know, they broadcast it at 11:30 until 12, and that’s when the movie came on. And we never missed that, you know. We was there by 11 o’clock just like—we didn’t get to church that [inaudible]. We’d be right there to watch the Little Atoms Club and see what was going on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have some favorite buddies that you went to the movies with?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, Bill Brandon and I went every Saturday; Bill [inaudible] sometimes—
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there a lot of kids in your neighborhood?
MR. SCHRADER: Quite a few, yeah. Bill and Jerry [inaudible] and Elizabeth [inaudible], Marianne Edwards, Dorothy Newton, [inaudible]. I forgot the [inaudible] girls’ name. They were a lot younger then I was. I didn’t play with them too much. They live right beside us. Yeah, there was—I’d say it was about 12-15 right there in the immediate neighborhood.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember when your mother used to hang out clothes? Did the other ladies in the neighborhood gather around the clotheslines and gossip or talk?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, sometimes I guess they did. I don’t remember any particular instance.
I remember during the war, it was hard to get meat and things, and we got some chickens, and we go out there and Dad would wring their necks, you know and they’d flop around and all the neighbors would come out— “What’s that?”
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, describe what you mean by wringing their necks.
MR. SCHRADER: Well, you grab a chicken by his neck and you actually twist the neck real hard and broke it, and then of course, the chicken would run around in circles and you know he was completely disoriented until he died you know, and a lot of times we’d take a hatchet and cut his head off so he’d bleed out. But—
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned standing in lines. Why did you have to stand in line?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, it depended on where it was and what you were doing but a lot of times, you know—well, back then you had food rationing stamps, you had the gas rationing stamps; everything was rationed, you know. And I remember, for instance, my mother had a thing on the stove about that big around and about that tall. It had a [inaudible] on the inside, and she saved all the bacon grease and fat that she had, and you’d take that to the store and you trade it in and you got credit for it. I know whether you got stamps or not, but you got credit for it because they used the fat—it had glycerin in it that they used to make explosions during the war. And so you had to stand in line in the butcher’s shop and then you had to stand in line for a lot of things. Well, I don’t remember standing in line too much for the movies.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about cigarettes, did you stand in line for cigarettes?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t know. Daddy always bought them by the carton, but I don’t know. I remember when we go to Virginia, Oak Ridge was dry and we’d go to Virginia—my dad didn’t drink, but everybody he knew drank and we go up there and we’d stop at the state store up there sold liquor. And you could get five-fifths and that was it, you know. You get a gallon and that was all you could have and we’d put that gallon of whiskey in the whisky and five-fifths all over the car and when we’d come back well, he’d give it to whoever wanted it, you know whoever had him get it for him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, that time the city was gated and you had to go in and out [inaudible].
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, you had to go through the gate and they searched the car. Occasionally, if they suspected something, and I remember, for instance Uncle Archie and Aunt Alpha, they had a lady staying with them. She was an elderly lady and they were taking care of her and what was her name? Annie Catherine. Annie Catherine. And there was a many a time that she rode back to Oak Ridge with the couple fifths under her dress between her legs.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have a personal ID badge?
MR. SCHRADER: No, I never did get one. You had to be 12 years old to get one and they quit—they opened the gates before I was old enough to get one.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, tell me about what you remember when you went through the gates, had to come back. Which gate did you generally go through?
MR. SCHRADER: We generally came back through either [inaudible]. When we got there, of course there was a line of cars; a lot of times if you got there in the daylight, it was a line of cars, they would stop and asked to see your badges, your pass. If you were a visitor, you had to have a visitor’s pass and you had to be met at the gate by whoever is going to escort you in, you know. But, that was about it unless they decide to search your car and sometimes they would search your car and they were looking for cameras, guns, whiskey, illegal items, you know that kind of thing, but I don’t think we have had our car searched. Uncle Archie had his searched one time. He had a ‘39 Plymouth, which Marvin and Wesley painted about every two years, you remember that? Anyway, I remember he had little one wheel trailer, you know and he had some—my Granddad Hall raised bees and Uncle Archie got a couple [inaudible] bees from Granddaddy Hall and he bought him back and he had them wrapped with the canvas. And that somehow that canvas got lose on the way back and when he got to [inaudible] gate, the bees was all loose and them guards were—flagged them on through right quick. They said, “Get the hell out of here.”
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did your Uncle Archie live?
MR. SCHRADER: The first house he lived in was 102 Newkirk Lane, which is just top off of New York above Tennessee, Pennsylvania. That’s the first house I ever stayed in right there. I spent the first night in Oak Ridge right there in our house. Later, let’s see if I can get this right because he moved several times. Later, he moved to Maiden Lane, then he was up on Wellington Circle, then they moved down in to the new houses down off of Robertsville, and I think that’s the last house they lived in here in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned your mother shopped at a store on Robertsville. Where was that located?
MR. SCHRADER: The intersection—if you’re going down the hill from my house on Louisiana, when you got down to the intersection of Robertsville Road and Louisiana Avenue, you took a right and you go out there about three blocks and on the left was a large square store. And it was just a general store and it was here from the origin of Oak Ridge. It is now, I think a church and a meeting house, but back then, it was a store.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall who ran the store?
MR. SCHRADER: No, I don’t. I don’t know who owned it or who ran it. I just know it was there, and I bought a lot of bubble gum and took a lot of bottles and sold them to him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your family have a telephone?
MR. SCHRADER: No, there was only one on the street and the Brandon’s had it. We didn’t have one for a long time and then later on, we got one.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where you on the party line at that time when you got a phone?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t know. I didn’t talk on the phone much of that age, you know. I had a girlfriend lived out near Hilltop store. I’d go out there and see her, I didn’t never think about calling her, you know. I just go out there and see her.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever attend the skating rink at Jefferson?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about that.
MR. SCHRADER: What is there to tell? It was a skating rink and that’s where all the girls hung out, that’s where we went.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was it located?
MR. SCHRADER: It was located right there on the corner of the [Oak Ridge] Turnpike and what’s the name of that street? I don’t remember the name of that street.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Jefferson Circle?
MR. SCHRADER: No, Jefferson Circle was on up. It was right there on the—right across from where the Pilot Mini-Market is now; I guess you’d call it. It was sitting right there on that little hill right above the Turnpike.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is that across the street from where the Shell station is today?
MR. SCHRADER: Is that a Shell? I thought that was a Pilot? Okay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s a Shell station.
MR. SCHRADER: Okay, I don’t ever buy gas there so I don’t know. So, it was a Shell station?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you know what the inside of the skating rink looked like?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, they had a place where you could sit and change, you know put your skates on. You could rent skates or you could bring your own, of course, they had a big flat skating rink floor and was sort of fenced off, you know and they had a little concession stand where you could get snow cones, and Cokes, and that kind of thing and that was about the size of it. I think they had some restaurants.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about the museum that was located in the old cafeteria building across the street. Did you ever attend it?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, yeah, a lot of times. That was the Atomic Energy Museum back then, of course, they’ve done away with that. “Atomic” is a bad word now, so it’s a Science and Energy Museum over here on the hill behind the Civic Center—yeah, I went there a lot of times. Back then, they had the mockup of Little Boy and Fat Man in there. I remember that. I think they still got Little Boy over here at the new museum, [inaudible]. They had a lot of pictures in there of atomic bombs going off and pictures of Enola Gay and Box Car and those are the B-29’s that dropped the bombs. And they had a lot of things about nuclear medicine and what the promise of nuclear energy was and this kind of thing, and they had a lot of pamphlets, which I got a bunch of them [inaudible]. I cleaned out my garage. I’ve got stuff sitting over there, but I’ve got a bunch of those old pamphlets here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that a fun place to visit?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, and you used to get a radioactive dime. I’ve still got one or two of them. They won’t give them out anymore. They’re too dangerous, but back then they did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What school did you attend after you left—you came to Woodland and went through the 6th grade, finished the 6th grade in Woodland? And then where did you attend junior high?
MR. SCHRADER: Went to the original Robertsville School and it was the old Robertsville School where—I forgot what they call it [inaudible]? It was called Jefferson Junior High. It was Jefferson and I went there in the 7th grade, and then they were in process of re-doing that so they moved us up to the old high school up on Kentucky Avenue, and I went to the 8th grade at Kentucky, on Kentucky above Blankenship Field.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, you were pretty far away from there where you lived. Did you ride the bus to school?
MR. SCHRADER: Never rode the bus, I was always into Safety Patrol from the 6th grade on and when I was in the 7th grade, I was a lieutenant on the Safety Patrol, and then when I was in the 8th grade I was promoted to captain. So, my job was to get there early and get the entire patrolman out to escort people across the street and see that decorum was maintained and all that, you know, so I walked every day. I walked every day I went to Robertsville and I walked every day I went to junior high, I mean to Kentucky, because I had to get there early. I had to be there in time for the bus started getting there, you know and I had to have my people out doing—there at the crossings and where they needed to be.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, how did you become a Safety Patrol?
MR. SCHRADER: They just picked me. That’s all I can tell you.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, how were you different, did you have a different dress? How did people know you were the Safety Patrol?
MR. SCHRADER: We had a white belt that went around us and a strap that came over our shoulder and then if you were an officer, you had a badge commemorating what your status was; lieutenants were red and captains were blue. You were in the Safety Patrol, too, weren’t you?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes, I was.
MR. SCHRADER: That’s what I thought.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, you had kids in the Safety Patrol that would go out to the street crossings and see that they didn’t get hit by the cars and—
MR. SCHRADER: Right. That’s exactly right and, for instance, when I was at Kentucky Avenue, I had to help somebody down below the old Center Theater where Tennessee came across, that’s where the buses came and it was what we called the bus stop, which was sort of a shed like thing. I had to have one there, then I had have one up on Broadway where they had to cross to the school again. I mean, the road to get up the hill to go to school. I had to have one on Kentucky up at the top of the hill where they might be crossing coming to school and I had to have one down where the old library used to be.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was that located?
MR. SCHRADER: The old library was located off of Kentucky Avenue right above the tennis courts. Well, the tennis courts are still there. It was a Rec. Center back then and library.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What were some of the other jobs a Safety Patrol did?
MR. SCHRADER: Well we were sort of like hall monitors in a way. We also had to report any—we call them illegal activities with any fighting or—we had to break up the fights. I think that’s why I got to be picked for Safety Patrol because I was always big for my age. But, yeah we had to put the flag up and a lot time we had to see that the flag got put up because they picked different students to do it, you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the kids respect your authority?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, I was bigger than they were and I played football, so [inaudible].
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what grade did you play football?
MR. SCHRADER: 7th, 8th, and 9th.
MR. HUNNICUTT: While you were up in Jefferson on the hill?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember who your football coach was?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, Lord, yes. Nick Orlando was the head coach and John [inaudible] was the line coach, and I was tackle and guard, and center. So, I had John [inaudible]—John just died a couple of months ago.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of classes did you take when you went to junior high?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, we had what they called core, which was sort of a combination of a Homeroom, History and Sociology, I guess you’d say. We had shop. It was either wood working or metal working and that kind of thing. We had Phys. Ed. every day, you know and we had Art and Music, and that was about the size of what we did there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember who your music teacher was?
MR. SCHRADER: I remember her face, but I didn’t remember her name. I never did like Music. I’ll just put it to you.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your favorite subject in school?
MR. SCHRADER: Metal Shop. I like Shop, and John [inaudible] was a Shop teacher up at Jefferson and he taught wood working and I still got an old gun case that I made up. [Inaudible] for John, or when he was teaching.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How was the neighborhood in Woodland different than the neighborhood in Louisiana Avenue?
MR. SCHRADER: It was spread out more; you know the children were farther apart. Up there, you could walk out my front door, take about two steps, and go on to the next house, you know. The range, in fact the same boardwalk served both of us. It came down from Louisiana Avenue and [inaudible] off to the left and went up the steps. [Inaudible] veered off to the right and you could just walk around in their house. Everything was a lot closer than it was here in Woodland.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of house in Woodland did you live in?
MR. SCHRADER: I lived in a flattop, two bedroom flattop over on, 132 Northwestern Avenue.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what did the inside of that house look like?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, it had two doors, and it had a back door was on the left side of the house facing from the street and that went out to a garbage stand where you put your garbage cans and this can thing. And in the front door, you came in straight from the street. When you walked in, you walked in to living room. If you turned left, you went in to the kitchen and if you continued left, you went in to the furnace room, which is an oil converted coal furnace, really. Then, you could walk right out the back door and to the garbage collection area. If you continue straight as you went through the living room, the living room was essentially off to your right, if you went straight, you came in to a little hall way, which if you went right, you went in to a bedroom and a bathroom was to your left just off that bedroom. If you went to your left, you went into the master bedroom, which is bigger bedroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mention the heat was provided by—[inaudible] supplied by heat. Where did you keep the oil?
MR. SCHRADER: There was an oil tank buried in the ground and they would come out and fill the oil tank periodically and I dug mine up. I had a 240 gallon galvanized tank with a vent pipe and a fill pipe on it, which stuck up about 18 inches above the ground. They would fill it up every so often.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Who was they?
MR. SCHRADER: It wasn’t Roane-Anderson. What was the one that took over after Roane-Anderson? MSI, right. MSI was the one that come up and filled—
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have to pay each time they came to fill the tank up?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t know whether Dad had to pay or not. I don’t know. All I know, we were paying rent, and I don’t know whether that was included in the rent or not. I know when I was working, anytime I had a job, I had to pay 10 percent of whatever I earned as rent to my Mom and Dad, which I thought was awful, but it turned out to be alright.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what types of jobs did you have growing up?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, when I was—I went to work with public works when I was at 14. I worked at Woodson’s [inaudible] City Market. Do you know where that is? Woodson’s [Inaudible] City Market?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No, where is that?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, it’s right through the underpass on the old Clinton Road where the old Elza Drive-In used to be. It’s right there on the right and I worked there as a bag boy, and later on, I got promoted to Assistant Produce Handler. And through the summer I worked there six days a week.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How old were you when you worked there?
MR. SCHRADER: I was 14. They lied and said I was 16, so they could put it on my social security. I told you I was big for my age.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned Elza Drive-In; where was that located?
MR. SCHRADER: It was located right under the underpass, the railroad underpass. As you went under that, if you took an immediate right, you go down a little gravel road, and that was the Elza Drive-In Theater was right there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there any other restaurants out there in that area?
MR. SCHRADER: There was a beer joint right across the street, which I used to eat lunch at on Saturdays. But they’d make sandwiches and this kind of thing, but on Sundays they were closed because you couldn’t sell beer on Sundays. So, on Sundays they were closed, so I’d usually get maybe a quarter pound of bologna and some pork and beans and one of these big pickles on the stick, you know and eat outback of the store.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember home milk deliveries?
MR. SCHRADER: Lord, yes. In fact, when I was delivering papers, I used to stop the [inaudible] dairy man, especially in the summer time and steal ice, get ice from him. And he was a good ole guy. Sometimes, he’d save us a little carton of chocolate milk or whatever he had handy, you know we’d get it from him. I delivered the Knoxville Journal because it was a morning paper and it didn’t interfere with my football practice at night, so.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were you living in Woodland when you delivered the Journal?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, and the [Knoxville News] Sentinel.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about delivering papers in those days. How did you get the newspapers?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, mine came up on the corner of Gettysburg and Northwestern, and they just put them out there. You didn’t have plastic bags. You didn’t have rubber bands. You had to learn how to fold them and you didn’t get to fold them at the end of the driveway. You had to take them and make sure they got on the porch. And I remember—and another thing the routes were a lot bigger back then. I had 87 daily’s and 136 Sundays, so a lot of times, I’d have to make two or three trips and have that bag full and my arms loaded up, you know. And I would fold them up as I would go; you know and see if they got to where they were going.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was Wednesdays a bigger day than the rest of the week?
MR. SCHRADER: Seemed like it was Thursdays was a bigger day.
MR. HUNNICUTT: A lot of ads in the newspaper?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah. I was thinking it was Thursday.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get paid?
MR. SCHRADER: I got more money than the Sentinel did. I got 12 cents a customer per week, and I got 6 cents for Sunday customers. And like I said, I had 87 daily’s and 137 Sundays.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, how did you get the money from your customers?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, I had to go collect it. You went and collected it and entered it in a book. And then after you got it, the paper man gave you a bill, and you had to cover that bill and then what was left was yours. And I had all those row apartments down here, off of Purdue, you remember them?
MR. HUNNICUTT: The brick apartments?
MR. SCHRADER: The brick apartments. Boy, they were nice. I could go in there—I could get rid of a bunch of papers in a hurry, you know. I had from Northwestern down toward Manhattan and back then, where the Credit Union is now, there were apartments right there. I had from there, and then I had from there and then I had all of Marshall Circle, and of course, I had all of Purdue down through there. I had Marshall Circle, Nevada Circle, Gettysburg from Manhattan, up to Northwestern, and then that was it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did your mother shop when you lived in Woodland?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, there was Woodland Shopping Center right down here, which it had a grocery store. I think it was an A&P. Anyway, there was a grocery store, a Texaco service station, a drug store, and I think there was a barber shop and a beautician shop on down Manhattan. Well, it’s still there, you know you go down and see it. She did a lot of shopping there, and then back before Downtown was made, there was some shopping down there, which is what we used to call the Farmers Market area but they closed them down and made grocery stores. Smith; you remember [inaudible] Smith?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No.
MR. SCHRADER: You don’t remember him? Well, his dad owned a grocery store down there. He lived up on Newberry Circle. His dad owned a grocery store. I worked for him for a while.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Are you speaking of where Lizz’s Market used to be?
MR. SCHRADER: No, Lizz’s Market was down there, the old Pan-Am down where Nissan—well, I think she was down there in the beginning. The old WATO radio station was there. There was some kind of appliance store. I forgot the name of it, and there were two grocery stores. Smith had the one closest to the Turnpike and I worked there for him for a while, and I delivered papers for [inaudible] for a while. He delivered the Sentinel, and whenever he needed somebody to fill in for him, I’d deliver them.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about the Snow White Drive-In?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, I dated three girls from there. I remember that. It was the place to go, you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was it located?
MR. SCHRADER: It was located down off the Turnpike, near the Medical Arts building now where it is, or the Physician’s Plaza I think they call it. But, it was right there off the Turnpike. It had a circular drive all the way around it. People would go down there and drive all the way around that circle to see who was there and I had a motorcycle, and I would go down there, now this was after I was 18 or 19, I would go down there. Motorcycles were rare back then, and I had a 1956 Triumph 650cc Tiger 110, it was called and everybody liked that motorcycle, and of course, it was hopped up. I had flat tappets and racing springs and Q cams and TT racing carburetor on it, and it’d outrun about anything around here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you buy the motorcycle?
MR. SCHRADER: I bought it from Carroll Green.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was he located?
MR. SCHRADER: He was located down off of Jefferson at Green’s Cycle Shop. The cycle shop’s still down there, of course Carroll’s dead. Carroll just lived right around the corner from me on Quincy.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was he in the old Jefferson bus terminal building at one time?
MR. SCHRADER: No. Well, yes, he was. Yes, he was because the first motorcycle I bought was a 1949 Indian, and I bought it from Sam [inaudible], over here on Gettysburg. And Sam had torn the transmission out of it. Well, it had a bunch of needle bearing in it, and they’d come loose and got all through the transmission. So, I took that thing apart, and the main shaft in there was scored, and I took a set of my [inaudible]. It was about 14,000 [inaudible] and I took some emery paper and some emery cloth and polished that up as good as I could get it. I went down to old Dougherty’s down here on the Old Harriman Highway, outside of Oliver Springs, and I bought part of the transmission off of one of his and pressed them bearings out and cleaned them right good, and put them in there. And I got that motorcycle running. And I violated everything he told me. I put high detergent oil in it. They said, “That’ll mess it up,” you know. But anyway, I went down to Carroll Green’s and had him—that’s the first time I’d ever run into him. I went down there and had him order me a main shaft for that 1949 Indian, and he did. But that one I fixed stayed in there. When I sold that bike, I had given them the main shaft that I ordered from Green with it. It was still going strong.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Back at the Snow White Drive-In, do you recall what it looked like inside?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, it was like the Sonic, you know they had waitresses that come outside—car hops we called them. I never was in there very much. They had some booths in there, and I think it had a juke box. But most of the time, I stayed outside. I never even got in there much.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about the swimming pool? Did you attend the swimming pool during the summertime?
MR. SCHRADER: Lord, yes. I rode my bicycle down the hill from Louisiana Avenue to go to the swimming pool.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was the swimming pool located?
MR. SCHRADER: Grove Center, and it’s still there. It’s still a landmark and when I worked for [inaudible] later on, I had to go in there and clean that thing up before he’d open it up, you know. When I worked for the Recreation Department, I worked for them for three summers while I was going to school. Do you know Rabbit Yearwood?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MR. SCHRADER: You know, Margaret Yearwood?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No.
MR. SCHRADER: His daughter? I used to date his daughter. I’d get in trouble. I’d offer him a ride on my motorcycle, but he never would take it. He said, “You ain’t getting me on that damn thing.” I worked for Coach Green, he and Shep Lauder, and we had a bunch of summer help, you know. And I would coach on the playground and then later on, I’d be what they’d call a Rec. Attendant, which I got to mow the grass, line the ball fields, and take care of anything that needed to be taken care of.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the playgrounds at the schools that they had in the summertime.
MR. SCHRADER: Well, we had a playground program. It usually ran for about 10 weeks. I was coach on the first playground at Glenwood.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How old did you have to be to be a playground instructor?
MR. SCHRADER: I don’t know if they had an age limit. I was going to college, I know that. And see Dorothy Tate, you remember her, who used to coach Oak Ridge Women’s Basketball?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MR. SCHRADER: She was the lady coach. We had a man and a woman and we had—I think I had three softball teams; one girls and two boys. I had senior boys and junior boys and I had [inaudible] and Howie Moss was on the senior boys.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did each school compete against each other? Did playground schools compete against each other?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah. Yeah, we had a whole league that we played against. We played against Scarboro, we played against all the other playgrounds. And I started the girl’s ball team at Glenwood. I had to go down to Glenwood one year, and I started a girl’s ball team down there, and it was pitiful. They didn’t win a game but they won one game by forfeit, but the next year, they were the city champions.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What other type of activities did the kids have other than softball?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, when I was going to school, we shot marbles a lot, but the schools decided that was too much like gambling because we were shooting them for keeps. But, we’d play marbles, [inaudible], Pigs Eye, and later on when I was coaching on the playground, the Elks had a marble tournament. I had to teach the kids how to shoot marbles because they didn’t know anything about it, you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, tell me how you shoot marbles.
MR. SCHRADER: Well, first off you draw a circle and usually it’s about 4-5, or 6 feet in diameter. You put all the marbles—you have to bag or [inaudible] your marbles up. You put them out in the center, and then you have a shooting marble, which we called a [inaudible]. And you drew a straight line and you lagged for the line to see who got to shoot first and what you did you got at a set distance and you shoot whoever and whoever closest to the line got to shoot first. Then, you had to shoot from the circle, where the marbles were, you put your last knuckle on the line. That’s as far as you could get in and then, any marbles that you knocked out were yours. Now, if your [inaudible] stayed in the circle, you had to holler “[inaudible].” That meant that you got to stay in the circle, you got to shoot again, and you got doubles or triples, or anything you got. If you didn’t say it fast enough, you had to get out of the circle and any marbles you got, you shot—you got to keep.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have a favorite type marble you liked to shoot?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, Lord. I’d drive all over Oak Ridge to get them. I had one I called cherry [inaudible], I had Steelies. Steelies were actually big ball bearings about so big, you know, and a lot of time they didn’t want you to use Steelies because they would always stick and would always knock out whatever they’d hit.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now was this in a dirt playing area?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah. It was just all dirt. Yeah, you’d just scrape out a flat place on the dirt. In fact, up on Louisiana Avenue, I had a place up there and shot marbles. People would come from all over the neighborhood to shoot marbles with me. I was usually pretty good at it. I had a whole chest full of marbles that I’d won.
In fact, when I married my second wife, my brother-in-law lived up on the hill. The first thing I did was buy a little bag of marbles and took them up there to him. I said, “Now, I’m going to marry your sister. I’m not giving you all of your marbles back, but here are some of them.” I’d give him his marbles back.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember when they dropped the bomb in 1945? Were you old enough to remember that day?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, where were you and what did you remember?
MR. SCHRADER: I was up on Louisiana Avenue. Dad went to work and he told us to be sure to listen to the radio that day and strangely enough, I just realized here a month or two ago that I came here exactly one year before the atomic bomb was dropped. I came here on August 6, 1944. It was dropped on August 6, 1945. But anyway, I remember Dad telling us to be sure and listen to the radio. We had the radio on all day long, which we usually didn’t do that. Mom’ll listen to the soap operas and that was about it and I wasn’t in the house. But, I listened that day, and they told about the new weapon and its devastating power. I don’t remember whether they called it the atomic bomb or not, but I remember the day. The day that they broadcast and told us that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think your mother knew what your father’s job was; what he did?
MR. SCHRADER: No.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever remember him talking about his job?
MR. SCHRADER: No. He wouldn’t tell you diddly about it and he didn’t tell me much about it until I went to work at [inaudible]. He just didn’t talk about those kind of things. He still doesn’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about in March of 1949, when they opened the gates to the city? What do you remember about that celebration?
MR. SCHRADER: I saw some of my first airplanes that day. I laid out there on top of the coal box and watched that DC-3 fly around all over Oak Ridge, and I remember going down to Jackson Square or Downtown, we called it Downtown then. And they had a parade down there. I forgot that guy’s name. He used to have the “Queen for a Day” program on the radio.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Jack Bailey?
MR. SCHRADER: That’s it. Jack Bailey; he was here and Rod Cameron. He was a western movie actor and some other dignitaries. I think [inaudible] was here. I always liked Estes. He always sort of reminded me of Abraham Lincoln without a beard.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you stand when you watched the parade?
MR. SCHRADER: I was all over the place. I was 11 years old. I wasn’t tied to any one spot. I think I started off down there at the bus terminal, there on Tennessee and then I went from there up on top of the hill, up where the brick walk is now, you know, next to the [inaudible] Theater. I went everywhere. I wasn’t just one place.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there a lot of people in the Jackson Square?
MR. SCHRADER: Quite a few, quite a few, yeah, and a lot of cars were there. Like I say, there weren’t a lot of cars back then, but boy, they all come together when that happened.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned your mother used to listen to soap operas on the radio. You mentioned that “Queen for a Day.” What was that?
MR. SCHRADER: That was a program where they would pick out some lady—I don’t know whether they picked them out of the audience or not. I didn’t listen that much. Anyway, they would pick her out and make her queen for a day, and she got all kinds of prizes and trips and whatever. She would listen to— one of her favorites was “Ma Perkins.” When “Ma Perkins” came on, I left and “Days of Our Lives” was on back then and “Stella Dallas”. And there were about three or four that she listed to. I listened to “Dick Tracy”, “Lone Ranger”, “Eddy Arnold”, “The Shadow.” Those were the radio programs that I listened to.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember when you first got a TV set?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes, I sure do. It was right over here on 132 Northwestern Avenue.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How was the reception?
MR. SCHRADER: Not very good. Mr. Adams who was a shop teacher at the high school, you remember him? He lived up on the hill behind us. Now, he had a huge mess. You know, he’d get [inaudible] and a lot of places when they came on the air. I don’t know if [inaudible] was on back then or not. But we could only get two stations, that was Channel 6 and Channel 10 and it was all travelogues and old movies and this kind of thing. The only NBC and ABC and CBS station was—my dad would hurry home from work to see this was “Pinky Lee” and “Howdy Doody”. That was the only syndicated programs. The rest of the time, it was travelogues and test patterns. We had a lot of test patterns.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what was on the test patterns?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, it was an Indian facing to the left and then a bunch of grids, different grids, and that kind of thing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your favorite cowboy?
MR. SCHRADER: My favorite cowboy? Well, I had several favorites, but I liked Sunset Carson and I like Wild Bill Elliott. Those were my two favorites, you know they were more realistic. I didn’t care much for singing cowboys. Like I told you, I didn’t like music too much so, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, they were alright, but when they started singing, I’d turn them off.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever visit the Midtown Shopping Center?
MR. SCHRADER: Lord, yes. All the time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me where that was located.
MR. SCHRADER: It’s located right about where the Civic Center is now and Oak Ridge Public Library. It was located right there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what stores were in the shopping center?
MR. SCHRADER: There was a pharmacy or drug store, there was a grocery store, there was a movie theater there, which Mom never would let me go to.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Why was that?
MR. SCHRADER: They always had a cutting and a shooting because they had a place there that sold beer, Rec. Hall like thing. I didn’t get to go there, ever. I don’t think I was ever in that movie theater at all.
MR. HUNNICUTT: She thought it was a rough place to visit?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, she thought it was too bad, but now, we had a Rec. Hall down in Jefferson, down where the market is now, you know, [inaudible] market. There was a rec hall down there and a power station, a steam plant and the steam plant provided steam all the way up the Turnpike for all those dormitories. Of course, that museum you were talking about, all of those areas were heated by that steam. Jefferson was heated by that steam.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the steam lines coming across the Turnpike and going to the different dormitories?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, yeah. I remember there was a steam plant at Jefferson, like I say, and the steam lines were wrapped, you know about 12 inches worth of asbestos around them, to keep them from [inaudible]. I think they went underground a lot of times. Then, there was one right on the corner of Georgia. There’s a steam plant right there on the corner of Georgia and the Turnpike and there’s one down in east end of town. I didn’t go down there much.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you mean the far east of town?
MR. SCHRADER: The far eastern end of town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Towards Elza Gate?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, it was down in there. I think it was located—I’m not sure about this now, I think it was located down about where the refuse center is now, but I’m not sure. It was down there about somewhere because on Arkansas and across there, there was a bunch of places that had to be heated.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were in high school and you were dating, did you have dating rules or where did you go on your dates and how did you get there?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, when I was in junior high, I went to the movies most of the time. If you never been in a Safety Patrol, once a month you’d get free theater tickets. You remember that?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No.
MR. SCHRADER: Maybe you had to be an officer, I don’t know but anyway, for serving on the Safety Patrol, you’d get theater tickets and if you talked right, you could get two of them, and I’d take my girlfriend to the movies about once a month. When I got a motorcycle, of course, I went anywhere I wanted to. But that wasn’t in high school. I actually moved from Oak Ridge in 1954, and went to Loudon. Dad decided they weren’t going to sell these houses, and we moved down to Loudon, and I finished my junior and senior year from Loudon High School.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, what did you notice different when you when went to Loudon High School then the Oak Ridge high school?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, Lord. There was a world of difference. First off, you didn’t have to take Phys. Ed. every day, and since I never had Health, the state had a requirement you had to have Health. So, for six weeks I had Health and then for six weeks I had Physical Education, which was a joke down there. Here, they had something for you to do. Down there, they just turned you lose in the gym. But they had state requirements. You had to have Math, at least one year of Math; you had to have one year of American History; you had to have one year of Civics; and you have to have one year of Science to graduate in the state requirements. Of course, I had the Math. I had Math here and then I had Math down there, so I had four years of Math, and I loved American History; in Science, I had four years of Science.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think the Oak Ridge school system was ahead of the school system you attended after leaving Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, yes. Much farther; better equipment—well, when I was here, my sophomore year, I was president of the Biology Club under Mr. Asher and we had clubs. They didn’t have those down at Loudon. They didn’t have a Biology Club or a Chess Club. They didn’t have any of those kinds of things and they had a lot of absenteeism. A lot of those people were farmers, and when they needed the kids to help with the harvest or putting up tobacco or whatever, they’d be gone. But the teachers were good.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever visit the Oak Ridge Hospital for any reason?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, I visited it a lot of times. I had a friend of mine, Ed Pollard, caught polio. Did you ever know Ed Pollard?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MR. SCHRADER: Remember, he went on to MIT, but he got polio and back then, in the old hospital, of course, he was in the contagion ward, they wouldn’t let you in. I would go stand outside the window and talk to Ed; and Ed and I like flying. So after we delivered papers on Saturday morning, a lot of times we would hitchhike out to the Oak Ridge Airport down at Oliver Springs and we do whatever jobs we could do just to get flying time. We’d clean airplanes; we’d change oil, and do all kind of things.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you said hitchhike, tell me how that works.
MR. SCHRADER: You go out and stand on the side of the road and hold your thumb out and somebody will come along and pick you up. Back in those days, hitchhiking was a very common thing. Did you ever see the movie, “It Happened One Night?”
MR. HUNNICUTT: No.
MR. SCHRADER: You didn’t? Well that’s Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and they were hitchhiking and she used a technique of raising her skirt so a guy could see her legs, and they’d stop and give them a ride. But that was common. There were a lot of soldiers coming back from the war, and a lot of people moving around and that kind of thing and we’d stop and pick them up. We’d go out and catch a ride up to Hilltop and then we’d stand on the road, hitchhike until somebody would picked us up, we go down to the airport. Sometimes they’d take us all the way to the airport, sometimes they’d let us off at [inaudible] Store up there and we’d walk the rest of the way.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you feel safe living in Oak Ridge, growing up here?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh yeah, sure did; sure did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have to lock your doors or cars or anything?
MR. SCHRADER: We never locked the door. I don’t think they had ever locked the car until somebody burned a hole in his seat. Dad bought a ’51 Oldsmobile. I think they called it the Dynamic Eighty-Eight, and he left the window down and somebody flipped a cigarette and it landed in the car seat and it burned a hole about that big around in the car seat, then he started locking it and rolling the windows up then, after he got the seat repaired.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the Police Department in the early days, when you were young and running around town?
MR. SCHRADER: Yeah, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there a lot of policemen?
MR. SCHRADER: There was a fair amount, but there was a lot of Army people too, or National Guard. Up where I lived on Louisiana Avenue, one of the training areas, The National Guard would come out there and they would go out G Road—remember I was telling you about earlier and I don’t know what they did out there but they did a lot of training and that kind of thing. You’d see whole convoys, I guess you’d call them, going out there. And they had several armored cars, which was six-wheel armored vehicles where they looked like a 37 mm cannon on them and some machine gun ports. You’d see quite a few of those, and they were up around Louisiana all the time and they had some equestrian guards who would ride the fences if they didn’t have roads near. They had some of those. They guarded the place pretty well. It was well guarded. The police, well I went through the police station one time. They took Safety Patrol through the police station. It was down here what they called the Tunnell Building now. It used to be the gas company building, but that was the old original police station and they had an armory in it. I remember they took us in through the armory and they had a bunch of Tommy guns in there. I was really impressed with those Tommy guns because you see them in the movies all where the gangsters and everybody have them. And the police had plenty of them. But there were quite a few police, in fact the first guy I saw when I came into Oak Ridge that night—I told you I came in that ’39 Plymouth station wagon and it was raining, and right there on the corner, next to the police station, there was a pyramid thing in the middle of the road, and it had black and white stripes on it. And there was a policeman standing on that and it must have been 10 or 11 o’clock at night, in the rain directing traffic. There wasn’t any traffic lights, you know and a lot of the Turnpike was gravel. It was just two lanes and he was standing out there directing traffic, and there wasn’t that much traffic around. That’s the first Oak Ridger, I guess, I saw.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the doctors coming to your house and making home visits?
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, yeah, yeah, I sure do. I remember Dr. Preston, he turned out to be a baby doctor. I don’t know what you call him and I remember one time I got some kind of kidney infection; of course I lived in the woods. I ate everything I can get hold of in the woods, you know. People go out in woods, they’d starve to death. I ate everything out there, but anyway, I got some kind of kidney infection from something I ate. What was that old doc’s name? He come up there—he’d come visit me and I had to drink this big whole bottle of liquid, and he’d bring it. You didn’t have to go to the drug store and get it. He brought and it was an awful tasting stuff, but I had to drink it. He came four or five times, but that’s the only time I remember.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, when you graduated from high school, did you go to college?
MR. SCHRADER: I went to UT [University of Tennessee].
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then when did you come back to Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: Well, Mom and Dad came back the year I graduated from high school, 1956. They came back that December and bought a house over here on Pratt Lane, or moved into the house before the government sold them. I was away at school. I stayed in South Stadium Hall over there. So, I guess, I came back in 1957; first time I was back.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you meet your wife?
MR. SCHRADER: I met my first wife down in Loudon. My next door neighbor, she came down—my next door neighbor had five children, and she would come down every summer and babysit the children [inaudible] and Shelton would take a little vacation or whatever and that’s where I met her, right there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you all have children?
MR. SCHRADER: We had two children.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Boys or Girls?
MR. SCHRADER: Girls; both of them are girls. Lisa Marie and Angela Gayle.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you and your first wife live in Oak Ridge or Loudon?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes, we lived here in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your children go through the Oak Ridge school system?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes, they did. In fact, they went down here to Woodland and they had the same teacher I had. I had John [inaudible] in junior high, both of them. I think [inaudible] taught English to Lisa and Social Studies to Angie. They still fuss at me about this one, and they’re 50 and 48. But, I caught them fighting one time, I mean they were fist fighting, hurting themselves and I thought, “Well, spanking them is not going to help them any.” So, I said, “Well, I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you some togetherness time.” “What’s that, Daddy?” I said, “You’re going to have to go to school together, you’re going to have to come home together.” I said, “If one of you is invited over to somebody’s house, the other has to be invited or you can’t go.” “Oh, wow, that’s going to be a piece of cake,” they thought. They wasn’t going to get a whipping either. About three or four days later, the youngest one came to me and she said, “Daddy, how long does this togetherness last?” I said, “It lasts until you learn how to get along together.” Do you know it was about a month ago that my oldest one was still fussing at me, “That togetherness stuff was awful, Daddy.” I said, “You learned how to get along.”
MR. HUNNICUTT: As you saw your children go through the Oak Ridge school system, were there any indication they had it any better than you did, or about the same, or how would you describe their school days?
MR. SCHRADER: I think they had access to better equipment. Well, for one thing, they got to use hand calculators in school and that kind of thing, which I think helped them conquer the ideas rather than just the nitty-gritty of it, so to speak. So, I think they benefitted in that way and I think—it wasn’t as structured as it was back when I was going to school. Like I say, you took music, you took art, you took Phys. Ed. and grammar [inaudible] and that was it and of course, in high school, you had a lot of clubs and that kind of thing. They had benefits to that, too. And I think they learned really well. I know the youngest one got in the Beta Club, and Lisa, you know, there’s sibling rivalry there. Oh, that just tore Lisa up. She went to work and she got in the Beta Club, you know because she couldn’t have baby sister beat her out. So, it benefitted them both, yeah. In Loudon, I don’t think they had a Beta Club down there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you like best about living in Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHRADER: The convenience. It’s disappearing, but in the early days, you could get on a bus and go from one end of Oak Ridge to the other just by getting a transfer. No bus service. There was complete safety, you know, the whole place was fenced in and guarded. It’s not that way anymore. When I went to high school here, there were only two people in Oak Ridge High School who had automobiles. One of them was Dick Green, and the other one was—I forgot that boy’s name, he had a ’47 DeSoto, and he worked in Diversified, what we called Diversified Occupations; where he went to school half a day and worked half a day and had to have a car here. Students didn’t have cars and you walked everywhere you went. They had bus service, but a lot of times only the sissies rode the buses, you know. That’s the truth.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is there anything we hadn’t talked about that you’d like to talk about?
MR. SCHRADER: Yes. I think the recreational system here in Oak Ridge was far superior than anywhere I’ve seen. Because like I say, I coached on the playground for three years; I was a recreational attendant for a year, and we had Shep Lauder who had Babe Ruth’s baseball team. We had rec halls all over, we had rec halls at Jefferson, we had rec halls at Grove Center; one of them is still up at Jefferson and still sort of a bar and social club up there. That was one of the original ones, but it’s been done over. We had five movie houses. We had the Jefferson, we had Grove, we had Center, we had the Ridge, and Midtown. And of course, movies were the primary entertainment source back in those days. We had tennis. We had two good tennis courts; one up where I was telling you about at Jackson Square, and one down at Jefferson. Of course, they sold it off to the Girl’s Club and they did away with that one. But we had horseshoes, we have all kinds of extra activities. We had hobby clubs. We had a hobby shop. We had bridge clubs. I had all kinds of board games. You could go up to the old library, up off of Kentucky, you could go up there and get checkers, chess, Monopoly, you can get all kind of board games and play them right there. Those kinds of things don’t exist anymore and that was what was better. But, now, television has taken over a lot of that. That’s one of the things—I still like what’s left. There are still horseshoe places up near the old Wildcat Den, and I think there are still horseshoe pits over by the tennis courts.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about Wildcat Den? Where was that located?
MR. SCHRADER: Wildcat Den was located right there at the very end of Robertsville where it comes into the Turnpike and from the Turnpike, it was on the right hand side of the road. We just had a class reunion there, did you go? What year did you graduate?
MR. HUNNICUTT: ’62.
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, we had 1954, 1955, and 1956. They still invite me to the reunions even though I graduated from Loudon, but I went to school with them for 10 years, so I still get—
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that a gathering place for the young high school students?
MR. SCHRADER: That’s exactly what it was for. They had pool tables and card tables and games and a dance floor and a little stage. I don’t remember any bands we had. We probably had some local bands come and play and sort of a concession stand and that kind of thing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, it’s been my pleasure to interview you and I think your oral History will be a tribute to the history of Oak Ridge. And I thank you for your time.
MR. SCHRADER: Oh, you’re welcome.
[End of Interview]